THE ORDER OF CRÊPES SUZETTE.
“Are we knights?” asks Fiona. “Or just unemployed?”
Agnes is looking for her bank statements beneath the magazines. The bank statements are very red. “Is that dye?” asks Agnes. Alas.
“Eight motorcycles!” says Agnes. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable investment. Steel appreciates. But the millions transferred to star-naming companies? Misguided.
“Which one of you has been on the phone long-distance for the last five and a half months?” asks Agnes.
[:]
It’s always harder to throw a party penniless.
“At least, we have plenty of bread,” thinks Agnes. She still needs to butter the toast and add cinnamon. Cinnamon doesn’t grow on oak trees.
“Mr. Zimmer brought 26 tons of spices,” remembers Dorcas. “I put them in the back yard.”
Who mailed us 26 tons of spices? Agnes opens the little card. The handwriting is appalling. It looks like something-something Mrs. Borage. Something-something love. Something-something… Magellan? Who invited Magellan?
“I didn’t mean to,” says Ozark.
But did Magellan mail butter? No, he didn’t. This will require a cookbook. Annals of the Irish Potato Famine. Le Ménagier de Paris. The Many Ways for Cooking Eggs. Agnes checks the recipe box instead.
Oil of Cockatoos
Take lavender cotton, knotgrass, ribwort, French mallows, strawberry strings, walnut tree leaves, the tops of young bays, sage of virtue, fine Roman wormwood, chamomile and red roses, of each two handful, twenty quick cockatoos, and beat them all together in a great mortar, and put to them a quart of calves’ foot oil, and grind them all well together with two ounces cloves well-beaten, and put them in an earthen pot, and stop it very close that no air come into it, and set it nine days in a cellar or cold place, then open your pot and put into it half pound yellow wax cut very small, and let it boil six or eight hours. Strain.
“Crisco!” cries Agnes. There is still a great big can of it. Thank goodness.
[:]
“Did you give Mrs. Scattergood her invitation?” asks Ozark.
“Of course,” says Mrs. Borage.
“I think it was a fragment of the episteme,” says Ozark. “Something irresolvable.”
“That’s lovely, dear,” says Mrs. Borage.
[:]
It is midnight. Neither today nor tomorrow.
“I am not ninety-nine nor one hundred, but something else,” thinks Mrs. Borage. She slips out of the house and stands barefoot on the bricks between the cairns. A red leaf of lettuce sails past in the wind.
Will Bertrand return with white sails? The cairns seem shorter. Mrs. Borage gazes over them. She sees a ship without sails. It is a black funerary craft. The leaves rush past in the wind. The sawing trees sound like the surf.
Mrs. Borage searches the cairns for the faces of the dead. The cabbages are badly decomposed. Mrs. Borage plugs her nose. It is a pungent deliquescence.
“The spirits have left them,” says Mrs. Borage. Her spirit feels far off also, aligning with the sun and moon, in syzygy.
[:]
When Mrs. Borage wakes up in the morning, she moves swiftly to the bedroom window. She would not be surprised if the world were covered with salt. It is not. The grass is yellow; the streets are gray. Mr. Henderson’s rooftop is dry and black.
The cairns have fallen. Trampled vegetables are strewn all across the yard. Now the brick pathway is just a series of linked circles.
“An eternity chain,” sighs Mrs. Borage.
Mrs. Borage inspects the yard. Here and there the grass has been torn. Great muddy gouges. Are those the prints of odd-toed hyraxes? Hartebeests? Soldiers marching in footwear special ordered to the front by their commander Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher? Ms. Kidney’s dogs give no comment. They are looking at their painted toenails, cyan blue, cyan green.
[:]
Ozark watches Mrs. Borage through the dining room window. Mrs. Borage is raking leaves with great vigor.
“She doesn’t seem any older,” thinks Ozark. “She seems closer to the sun.” Ozark feels as though she is seeing Mrs. Borage through bright yellow rays. Ozark walks out into the yard. She looks at the house. It has been wrapped in yellow barricade tape.
“Have we been condemned?” asks Ozark. Mrs. Borage is wearing crimson bluchers and her white ponytail is tied with a crimson ribbon. She’s whistling.
Ozark pulls at the yellow barricade tape. She rips a short strip and flips it caution-side down. She takes out her big black paint marker and writes the first thing that comes to her. She nails the banner above the door.
KOLIK JAZYKŮ ZNÁŜ, TOLIKRÁT JSI ČLOVĚKEM
She thinks it means, “Merry Meet We Within This Circle,” or maybe “Blessed the Gods Who Turn the Mighty Wheel.”
[:]
A many-colored montgolfière floats close to the tree line. Ozark blinks. The cloud cover rearranges itself rapidly on windy days. Now she can’t be certain. Would Bertrand return in a montgolfière? Her last postcard was an aerial view of Croton Magnus!
Agnes runs out into the yard to watch the montgolfière floating low over the trees. Her heart beats faster. Still, what is Croton Magnus known for, if not its steep terraces, its high, narrow roads and scenic overlooks? She can’t go chasing every montgolfière, dragon kite, and Cessna. The toast is burning.
[:]
Suddenly, Mrs. Borage hears a plaintive sound, wavering and thin. She throws down her rake.
“The Song of the Herring!” thinks Mrs. Borage.
The montgolfière crests Mr. Henderson’s house and starts to rise, the many-colored envelope expanding, and in the tiny gondola, Manxmen waving, singing along to the whine of the whisper burner, the old sad songs of the Irish Sea. Mrs. Borage waves back.
“I’ve never ridden in a montgolfière!” says Mrs. Borage. It is a crime in this day and age, that a centenarian can say that.
“Come around the house,” calls Fiona. Mrs. Borage gasps. A touring motorcycle, pink bodywork and gold chrome. Pink balloons trail from the exhaust pipe, and soup cans, and stuffed cockatoos.
“Happy birthday,” say the cockatoos.
“Happy birthday,” says Mrs. Borage. She smiles at Fiona. Her wig is large and freshly powdered.
“I don’t think the helmet will fit,” says Mrs. Borage.
Fiona dons the green helmet.
“It fits,” calls Fiona. Her antlers branch against the sky. She climbs onto the motorcycle. She kickstarts the engine. Around and around the pyre rides Fiona. The motorcycle is very loud. Mrs. Borage shuts her eyes.
The sound of the engine fades into the distance. Dorcas is picking up the broken pinwheels.
“She’ll be back,” says Dorcas.
[:]
Before Bryce began to découpage, she studied sports medicine. She doesn’t remember much. The foundations. Pheidip-pides at Marathon. The pentathletes at Delphi. She tries to remember more but she finds that her memories are very similar to Monet’s water lilies. She closes her eyes and concentrates, but she sees floating shapes.
“Green, ocher, blue, ultramarine,” says Bryce. Were her memories always like this?
“It’s my ecstatic temporality,” cries Bryce. “I’ve found it.”
She takes off her cap with the streaming ribbons. She takes off her cherry satin sash. She takes off her corset. She doesn’t want to be discredited by an hourglass figure, a relic of common time. She puts on her smock and starts to nail the barn stars to the side of the house.
Rosettes mean good fortune. Bryce paints eight red petals.
“She loves us,” says Bryce. “She loves us not.”