[:]
Mrs. Borage also loves Canada Day. Agnes makes Canadian bacon and Canadian muffins and Mrs. Borage smokes her fragrant pipe. What does she put in her pipe?
Canadian hemlock needles and Canadian maple leaves, Canadian pitcher plants, Canadian trilliums, little white hairs from the nectaries of Canadian Madonna lilies, a nice blend of shade tobaccos.
The pipe makes the whole house smell like the woodlands of Canada.
“A breakfast picnic,” sighs Mrs. Borage, “in the woodlands of Canada.” Everyone she has ever known is eating together.
“But the picnic baskets stay full,” remembers Mrs. Borage. “Somehow, there is herring enough.” Mrs. Borage glances around her. She is alone in the kitchen. It smells like glue.
“Herring enough,” she says.
[:]
Agnes is looking at the Petition of Notice and Foreclosure. Are those ladybugs? Agnes picks one off. She licks it.
“Rice,” thinks Agnes. From some sort of paint-and-adhesive based pilaf.
“Bryce should not be allowed in the kitchen,” thinks Agnes. Mrs. Borage is in the kitchen mixing batter. The secret is heavy cream and egg yolk. Mrs. Borage stirs briskly.
“Womlette!” cries Agnes. It is an omelet with a waffle base, popular in Canada.
Did the voice beneath the stairs say “womlette”?
“H” and “W” have a complex history, at least in the field of paleozoology. Agnes recently underlined the following entry:
Hwalebone. The horny laminae of the upper jaw of the hwale.
Hwale. The largest fish in the sea.
“Hmmmmm,” says Agnes. Has she been contacted by the disembodied voice of paleozoology? It must be so. She is not working hard enough.
“Or was it a hwitch?” thinks Agnes.
[:]
Agnes stares at the Calendar of Drifting Hours. She sees the day of Bernadette, the day of Petronella, the day of Ethelburga, the day of Lucy, the day of Zdislava, the day of Veronica.
“They haven’t RSVP’d either,” frets Agnes.
While on the subject of fretting: Mrs. Borage’s fiddle is broken in two! Agnes feels between the cushions of the sofa. Mrs. Borage’s spectacles! Also, broken. Her rocking chair. Her whale-tooth cane. Her fishing pole. Even her high-heeled boots. Everything Mrs. Borage owns is falling to pieces.
“It is to be expected,” thinks Agnes.
Like most paleozoologists, Agnes believes that the human chrysalis exists. It has taken on the commodity-form.
“The pupal case of worldy possessions will split open and Mrs. Borage will jump nude into the river!” predicts Agnes. “I hope we have enough processional torches.”
Hasn’t Agnes noticed the bottles of gas? Not yet. Bryce has stored them in the bathroom. She moved the bathtub into the kitchen. The bathtub looks natural in the kitchen. It’s the same size as the ball of chewing gum, which she has rolled into the yard.
[:]
Mr. Henderson is knocking on the front door. He has a question. Agnes hopes it is not a question about dog licenses.
Earlier, a tall, despondent man knocked on the door with a question about dog licenses. Ms. Kidney is very liberal with her dogs but as far as Agnes knows licenses are out of the question.
“I can’t say one way or another,” said Agnes. “You’ll have to speak with Ms. Kidney.”
“Does Ms. Kidney have a dog license?” asked the man.
“Ms. Kidney is a person,” said Agnes, gently. The man looked even more despondent. He and Agnes had very little to say to each other once the facts of the matter were established.
“Would you like to have a conversation about ideas?” offered Agnes, but the man did not. He wanted to have a conversation about dog licenses. It was an insoluble situation. Even Agnes began to feel despondent.
Luckily, Mr. Henderson does not want to ask about dog licenses.
“What is Mrs. Borage’s favorite lettuce?” asks Mr. Henderson. Agnes supposes that Mrs. Borage looks on the roughages equally. Don’t most people?
Mr. Henderson can’t help but feel that the woman in the doorway is giving him an uncomfortably shrewd look.
“Maybe her safety goggles magnify to the three power?” thinks Mr. Henderson. He notices that she is holding a broken violin, two pieces, cradled in her arms, in just the same way he holds his broken pots. Mr. Henderson has often thought that luthiers are the cousins of potters. He feels a small bubble of joy in his chest. But is it too presumptuous to assume cousinship with an adult niece of Mrs. Borage?
Mr. Henderson has a favorite lettuce. His favorite lettuce is bronze mignonette.
“Does Mrs. Borage like bronze mignonette?” asks Mr. Henderson.
“Has the late capitalist world system transposed the biological imperative?” asks Agnes.
Mr. Henderson performs a series of mental substitutions.
“Has money replaced death?” he asks. He stares into his cousin’s magnified eyes. What does she mean?
“As a cult?” thinks Mr. Henderson. “As a social hallucination?”
X
Mr. Henderson stands outside the library. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is wearing a Russian hat. He has never noticed the port-wine stain on her cheek or her circular beauty mark.
“Zdravstvuite,” says Mr. Henderson. She is staring off into space with a dreamy expression. Mr. Henderson looks up at the sky. Will he see a woman fly over the courthouse? Will he see clouds of salt and pepper? The sky is pale blue. Leaves are spinning and spinning in the street. Little vortexes are springing up everywhere. It is noon; the drifting hours spiral around the white sun.
[:]
Mrs. Scattergood is sitting on the circulation desk in spangled tights. She is trying to put her leg behind her neck. She looks at Mr. Henderson and blushes. She takes her leg down swiftly and almost upsets her mug of chamomile tea.
The woman standing in the reference section looks very tweedy in her houndstooth skirt and jacket, but Mr. Henderson recognizes an adult niece of Mrs. Borage. The adult nieces of Mrs. Borage are unmistakable although Mr. Henderson may be mistaking one for another. He thinks that their faces are more or less identical.
“But then I have never been a people person,” admits Mr. Henderson.
“What is a pogonip?” asks Mr. Henderson. Ozark frowns. She senses it is a word filled with luminous intensity. Her flashcards are in the flannel backpack on the circulation desk. She sorts through them.
“Is it Finnish?” she asks.
Mr. Henderson sees that Mrs. Scattergood is drinking from a familiar blue mug. Now it is his turn to blush. He ducks his head and sifts through her collection of science journals. She has been reading about translucent concrete. Mr. Henderson imagines himself, a mason of translucent concrete. He imagines making a library of translucent concrete. It would be ferocious in its beauty, and when he poured the final wall, the structure would glow with refracted light. Mr. Henderson would be blinded. He would have to borrow back his ugly blue mug. He would have to walk all through the town begging for his supper.
[:]
Ozark has not gotten as far as translucent concrete. She has gotten to Postnik and Barma, who built onion domes for the fool of Moscow. She has gotten to Anna Ivanovna, who built the palace of ice, ice elephants in the garden, ice ring doves in the nuptial chamber, ice sheets turned down on the ice bed, and blue-white doves nesting on the pillow slips. She remembers that Anna Ivanovna sewed iron rods in her shirtsleeves to protect her bones, the glass balls and sockets. She was not a front-bender.
“Or a back-bender,” thinks Ozark. She remembers the pink and gold tents pitched by the highways, all the vanished encampments, the sudden pyramids of acrobats that came down and left no trace.