The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  “For you,” she told Flo, removing a flat square package from the day pack; “For you,” to Ruby, another flat square package; “For both of you,” a larger package, book-shaped, which she dumped irritably on top of the piano. Then she handed me a bottle of red wine, told me to open it immediately, laughed bitterly, and asked if I didn’t think it was stupid the way people worried about whether or not a bottle of wine could breathe. William’s presents, she added, were still in the pack; he could get them out himself.

  An inauspicious start, although Ruby didn’t seem to notice that anything was amiss. She linked her arm through William’s and drew him toward the kitchen, showing him how she’d set a party hat in the middle of each of five pink paper plates. Flo, on the other hand, remained standing in the middle of the living room, her attention apparently fixed on her beaded, fur-trimmed moccasins, the left one dented at intervals with Lily’s toothprints and the toe chewed off entirely. From time to time she would sneak fast little glances at Helle, who had arranged herself, still frowning, on the edge of one of the sofa cushions.

  When I asked Helle if something was the matter, she laughed again and lit a cigarette. “Don’t mind me,” she said, exhaling. “Just pretend I’m not here.” Which of course wasn’t possible. Her smoke, for example, followed me into the kitchen, hanging around me as I uncorked the wine—a Chateâu Something-or-Other, undoubtedly very expensive—and then, after I’d sent Ruby and William out of the room so I could put the candles in the cake, gradually ascending to the ceiling, where it hovered, weary yet judgmental. Eighteen candles, two intersecting circles of nine candles each, according to our custom. “The cake, the cake, the cake,” Ruby was chanting. Meanwhile, a huge block of late-afternoon sunlight had been inserted through the window over the sink, making everything in the room so bright that even after the candles were lit, you couldn’t see their flames. In this yellow and substantial light to detect movement was impossible: one minute the chairs around the table were empty, the next minute they weren’t; the plates had hats sitting on them, then the hats were sitting on people’s heads.

  “This is very good cake,” said William, drawing his fork dreamily through his lips. Did he resemble Sam? He had the same hazel eyes, with a little more brown in them, but his hair was as fine and blond as Maren’s, and although the expression on his face when he looked at Ruby showed traces of an expression with which I was familiar, William’s adoration was clearly more forthright than his father’s, less calculating. “It’s good if you like dog biscuits,” Helle said. “It’s good if you like cardboard,” echoed cynical Flo. The cake was stale, its crumb depressingly dry, its icing dauntingly hard, its flavor nonexistent. An abstract idea of a cake, a cake elevated to the realm of pure thought, a cake eidolon—the logical result of a plan that presumed to turn the theft of a birthday cake into a symbolic act. “Did you ever eat a dog biscuit?” William asked, genuinely interested, his left elbow planted on the table, the palm of his left hand serving as a lever to tilt his head slightly to the right.

  “When I was in the Foreign Legion,” Helle replied. “Years ago. It was that or the commander’s arm.” But she was staring across the table at me, her former irritability having turned to despair. “Where did you get this?” she asked, and when I told her, leaning forward to describe the circumstances in a whisper, her despair turned to outrage. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she hissed. “I could have made a cake. I could have made you a really good cake.” Appetite, she went on to explain, was nothing more than a prelude to putrefaction, unless it was an appetite for the beautiful. Oh, I was a criminal, all right, but my crime had nothing to do with theft! “My mouth is a temple,” Helle said. “A temple,” she repeated, and yet even I must have noticed how life had a way of dishing up the stale or the overcooked, the tasteless or the pulpy, when what you were hoping for was the sublime. “Hand me that wine,” she ordered. “And would it be expecting too much to ask for a wineglass?”

  Meanwhile, the twins were opening their presents: from William they both received three pairs of cable-stitched, worsted knee-socks in basic colors (a practical, condescending gift clearly chosen by Maren, I thought, with its implicit suggestion of neediness), and from Helle the aforementioned copy of L’Oiseau bleu, as well as matching flat tin boxes, each with a picture of the Swiss Alps on its lid and, inside, a row of colored pencils sharpened to perfect points. Fifty of them, Helle explained, because it was important for the twins to understand that there were more colors in the world than red and yellow and navy blue—the practical colors of Maren’s wretched knee-socks—or than chocolate and vanilla and strawberry, she added, sighing. Ruby shouted with pleasure and began drawing on her napkin, as Flo simultaneously closed her tin and her eyes. “Aren’t we going to play any games?” William asked. “Well, sure,” Flo told him, her eyes still firmly shut. “Isn’t this a party?” She reached into her jeans pocket and drew forth a deck of cards. “Slapjack,” she said, shuffling and making a bridge of the cards, expertly, like a gambler. But what about pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey? Musical chairs? Once, at Mary Weisner’s, everyone had to whistle “Yankee Doodle” after eating a saltine. At Susan Turcotte’s they had to bounce up and down on balloons with their butts until the balloons popped. William said there were always treasure hunts at his own parties; Tante Helle made up rhyming clues which were great, even if they were hard to figure out. “So?” said Flo, continuing to shuffle. She asked William if he remembered the rules—hitting cards, digging-for-secrets cards, luck cards, love cards?

  “You bring the glasses,” Helle said, grabbing the wine bottle by its neck. “I don’t want any nine-year-olds digging around for my secrets,” she elaborated, pushing back her chair and wandering into the living room. “When rain is falling from the sky, I swallow the wet and spit out the dry. I don’t see what’s so hard about that.”

  It was less bright in the living room, because the single window faced north, out across Judkins’s cornfield, at the far edge of which a small red tractor was moving from east to west, and above it a sliver of deepening blue sky. Lyle himself, I figured, heading home to his exhausted wife, coins jingling in his overalls pockets. Lily was curled up, gently snoring and twitching, in a large armchair to the right of the door—Lily’s chair, we called it—its maroon fabric covered with a thin mat of gray fur. How drowsy I felt, and how relieved to sink down into the corner of the sofa! For isn’t it a fact of nature that any sleeping creature emits into the air around it a thick residue of sleep? You can hardly keep your eyes open; the wings of your nostrils flare, as mine were doing, with suppressed yawns. Helle switched on the record player and then settled back into the sofa, facing me from the opposite corner, her knees hugged to her chest, her unusually big-knuckled fingers linked to hold her knees in place, her bracelet of silver birds, beak to claw, beak to claw, sliding from her wrist to the crook of her white-sleeved arm.

  “The Act One finale,” she said. “The Don is trying to seduce Zerlina—‘Viva la libertà!’ Did you hear that? As if Zerlina’s liberty has anything to do with what he has in mind! But the violins aren’t fooled. Listen to them, Frances. Feet racing up flight after flight of stairs. Du-du-du, du-du-du. Du-du-du, du-du-du. Can you hear it? Up, up, up they go, heading towards the bedroom. Also towards the last note of Zerlina’s scream, which generally goes unvoiced—although Reri Grist sings it, if I’m not mistaken. Not Maeve Merrow, though. Never Maeve Merrow, which was a lucky thing for me.” Helle leaned across the central cushion, where a large hole spilled forth yellowish crumbs of foam rubber, to grab my hand. “Can you hear it?” she repeated, and I was suddenly alarmed to see her face so close to mine: the small, gleaming surfaces of her teeth; the garnets, like tiny blood clots forming at the filigreed base of each wildly swaying, teardrop-shaped earring; the spokes of her gray irises spinning around and around her enlarged pupils; the skin pulled so tightly, so impossibly thinly, over her bones that it was as if I were looking at her skull. “Let’s get drunk, Frances,” she s
aid. “Let’s get ourselves really drunk. ‘Fin ch’han dal vino calda la testa,’ as the Don would say.” She reached down to the floor, picked up the wine bottle, and filled the two glasses—jelly glasses, I’m sorry to admit, decorated with pictures of Stone Age cartoon characters—to the brim. Then, handing me one, she said “Skål!” and swallowed the contents of hers in three quick gulps.

  I took a sip to be polite, explaining that if she wanted to get drunk, that was fine, but I had to stay sober. It would soon be dark, too dark to walk all the way back to Quarry Road, and I didn’t want to end up driving my car into a ditch. “Well, if that’s all that’s worrying you,” Helle said, “we’ve got our ride worked out. Mr. Blackburn, Mr. Samuel Jenkins Blackburn, Sam to his friends and enemies alike, Sambo to his wife in her rare moments of playfulness, Professor Blackburn to his students, the devil to me, will be arriving at your house in exactly—” here Helle paused to consult my watch, a task which required that she once again grab my hand, yanking me toward her on the sofa—“in exactly forty-five minutes, as per his instructions. Drink up, Frances. The night is young.”

  Needless to say, I was anything but reassured. Sam coming to my house? Was he crazy? My dismay must have been obvious, for Helle held up one big-knuckled hand, palm out. “Sam’s idea,” she said, “not mine. He actually insisted. So let’s give blame where blame is due.” But I could already feel it: the walls gradually disintegrating into whirling particles, into air, into nothing, as if I were suddenly sitting on a hummock in the middle of the Great Bog at Horns, and it was just as Helle had described it to me—a flat, endless landscape of spore-shooting mosses and dwarf shrubs like fists and tongs, of insect-eating plants, of treacherous holes and fissures leading straight to hell. Nor was it as if I’d been transported there; rather, that the bog was where I’d been all along, though because my too-literal attention had been focused on those illusory, now-vanished walls, I hadn’t noticed. “Calm down,” Helle said. “It’s not the end of the world.” She gave me a strange little smile, slightly rueful, tender. “At least not for you,” she said. “Not for you, Frances Thorn,” she said, reaching out, this time gently, to stroke my cheek. Of course she was trying to tell me something; in her characteristically elliptical fashion she was hinting at some crucial piece of information, only I was too distracted to hear anything except for the faint soughing of peat. “Drink your wine,” she said. “It’s almost as old as I am, and it goes down a lot easier.” Which I proceeded to do. In fact I ended up drinking two jelly glasses full of wine, one right after another, becoming drunk and, in the process, strangely garrulous.

  If she really wanted to know, I said, the problem started when I was a girl in Philadelphia and I wanted to buy a square inch of Texas by sending in a cereal box top. You could do that, I reassured the skeptical-looking Helle. Hadn’t she lived in America long enough to know that such things happened every day? Except my mother wasn’t the kind of woman who thought children should act like children. For instance, I wasn’t allowed to read comic books, only Highlights for Children; comic books would frighten me, my mother said, but that was because she never took a close look at that horrible wooden family called the Timbertoes, whose sinister adventures were one of the magazine’s regular features. I wasn’t allowed to eat Oreos, only Lorna Doones, which would still rot my teeth, but not as fast. Besides, what did I want with a square inch of Texas when I lived in a twenty-room Tudor mansion on three acres of prime real estate in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city? Honestly.

  She would never have understood if I’d told her that the appeal of the square inch—which I pictured as the first tiny chip in an enormous and slowly emerging mosaic, a ranch complete with cowboys and horses and a bald cook named Curly—was that it would belong to me; it never occurred to my mother that as far as a child is concerned, a house and everything in it belongs to the parents. Whereas my parents’ myth held that what was theirs was also mine, which was just another way of saying that they owned my soul. Not surprisingly, as an adolescent I rebelled, although I told Helle she didn’t have to worry, I wasn’t planning to go into the details. The forms taken by this sort of rebellion are essentially the same, and consequently boring: the stifled soul longs for release, the methods it chooses alternately harsh and romantic, governed by warring urges to kill or to moodily expire.

  In the present context, however, it seemed to me one aspect of my own predictable rebellion was worth mentioning, and that was my restless attraction to bus terminals. I started with the terminal at Broad and Chestnut in Philadelphia, although in time I expanded my reach to embrace most major American cities, and later, Europe as well, including Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense—and once, even a tiny, moss-roofed terminal in the north Jutland village of Hvidsten, where I ate a bacon omelette with a man who sharpened knives for a living. “Feed-stain,” Helle corrected. “Feed-stain.” “Huh-vid-sten,” I reiterated, indicating that accurate pronunciation was the farthest thing from my mind, and that I didn’t want to be interrupted. Especially not now, not when I was finally getting to the point. For what those bus terminals had in common, what drew me to them, wasn’t the whiff of urine, the opportunity they offered to rub elbows with criminals and lunatics, but the storage lockers.

  Silver, mysterious lockers! Walls filled with them, banks and banks and banks of storage lockers! Generally they came in three different sizes: small ones, which could hold a single suitcase and possibly a shopping bag; the medium-sized lockers, two suitcases, maybe one suitcase and a garment bag, maybe up to six shopping bags; and those big enough to accommodate a bass viol or a dead body or a pony—all three, if you were clever at packing. The first thing I’d do upon entering a bus terminal would be to locate the storage lockers, which was easy enough. The difficult part came when I had to make a choice. A medium-sized box in the middle of the middle row? A small box, top row, near the men’s room, with a heart scratched into its silver door? Or should I make my choice based on a box’s number? (Nineteen if that happened to be my age at the time, seven when I was reading Ouspensky.) Or shut my eyes and pick at random?

  Although I never deposited any luggage. It used to be, when I went anywhere with my parents, we always had more suitcases than we could carry—matching things, with locks and monograms, good leather, lined with satin. But in the rebellious days of my adolescence all I owned was the accumulating square footage of cool mysterious space inside those storage lockers. Once I’d pocketed the key, I’d leave the terminal and walk around until I found the right place. This could be a bridge over a river, or a storm drain, or a litter basket, or a mail slot. I’d find the right place and drop the key; then I’d walk away. After a while I thought that I must own a space as big as the state of Texas, only what I owned was exotic and unexplored, separate and distinct, and it would forever remain that way because, unlike a real landscape, its parts would never be forced to come together into a single, boring geographic whole.

  “Like the Gold Room,” said Helle, “in Germany.” She was leaning back against the sofa’s arm, her skinny legs stretched out across all three cushions, her stockinged feet resting in my lap. When had she put them there? And her shoes—when had she taken them off? Furthermore, how long had Ruby been sitting there in the middle of the floor, wearing the discarded shoes—a pair of black ballet slippers—on her hands, making them walk up an invisible staircase in the shadowy air, as William and Flo stood whispering in the shadowy corner near the piano? If we didn’t turn on the lights, maybe Sam would think no one was home. “They’d make new keys, you know,” Flo said. “Other people would put things in the lockers. They weren’t yours,” she added fiercely. On the tape Zerlina was singing, softly, sweetly, to Masetto, “Vedrai carino, se sei buonino, che bel rimedio ti voglio dar”—“If you’re very good, my darling, you’ll see the pretty remedy I’ve got for you.”

  “The Gold Room,” Helle repeated. “Remember that, Frances. One of these days it’ll come in handy to remember that.” Then Lily
jumped from the maroon chair, her wolfish lips opening in an O, releasing that oddly conversational sound with which she greeted company. A car in the driveway, its engine running. Two short taps on the horn. He wasn’t even coming in, I thought, and for a moment—the time it took Helle and William to gather their things together—I actually felt betrayed. As in a way I suppose I had been.

  IV

  BETRAYAL AND PERFIDY; cowardice and censure—I find, even now, that I’m as eager to leave Horns behind as Helle was, as eager to place myself at a table in one of those seedy cafes she frequented as a student, beneath which, in basement shops, the tattooists practiced their art on the edge of the Copenhagen harbor, where the shrouds of the large sailboats chafed against each other, making the same sound which is produced by bowing a violin sul ponticello, nasal and glassy, and where the air smelled like fish. When, over a glass of akvavit, a sailor would ask Helle what her name was, she would say it was Henning, in order to differentiate herself from the tense, duplicitous creature who was responsible for her mother’s death, who supposedly compounded one crime with the intention of committing another. I’d like to leave Horns behind now, but I can’t. You might just as well try to tell the story of “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf” and omit the fact that its protagonist enjoyed pulling the wings from insects in order to watch their pathetic, frustrated struggle to fly. You can choose a life of crime, or you can compose operas. According to Helle, at least, those were the alternatives. And sometimes the boundary between them got confused.