Looking for gauze, she opens the small supply cabinet beside the sink. Reek of pine disinfectant, and she is in the forest. She can make out the path only by the slight tug of the yarn running drily through her fingers, that and the dark shapes of the recycling bins pulled out to the curbs for the Friday night pick-up. A shadow heaves up before her; her shoulder dashes into someone else’s and a hand squeezes her arm apologetically. The blackout has made everyone temporarily friendlier, and she wonders whether she shouldn’t just sit down on a stoop, or a stump, and wait for someone to sit next to her.
Now headlights slide over the ball of yarn, which is pausing, turning, continuing on its way. The yarn tugs at her hand and she keeps going, or someone does. Maybe it is her father, coming to see her! But no, it is a woman, so she hangs back. Her hands clamped on the cold stone, wishing her brothers weren’t so trusting. Her chest is pressed against the parapet, which is so high she can barely see over it, and so cold it stifles her breath. Her youngest brother bends to scoop up the traitorous ball of yarn and the visitor throws something over him — a little white changing shape like a ghost: a shirt — and something happens. Then it happens again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Six times, dear reader.
“The King has six sons,” being what the servants must have said. Not thinking to mention that he also had a daughter.
Let’s be generous, perhaps the servants loved her best, and sought to keep her secret.
Let’s be reasonable, how could they have known that when her six brothers ran forward, she would stay back?
And why did she stay back?
Perhaps she is a reader too, and knows that women are dangerous, especially when they are stepmothers, especially when they are witches or the daughters of witches, especially when they are Queens.
Perhaps the servants did mention her, and the Queen did not choose to sew her a shirt. Wishing to give the boys a fair chance, perhaps. Knowing that daughters can do things that sons can’t, like spin nettles into thread, and keep their mouths shut. Daughters do their duty.
THINGS YOU LEARN FROM READING
Women are trouble — if it isn’t an evil wife, it’s an evil stepmother. Or mother-in-law. Mothers are usually all right, unless they’re witches — watch out for witches. And their daughters.
You might be all right with kings, princes, and fathers, unless, as is usually the case, they’re under the influence of someone else, usually a woman. Men are weak. Sometimes they rescue you, but they always have help — from ants or birds or women. Sometimes you rescue them. This is kind of sweet.
You can trust animals. Sometimes they turn into people, but don’t hold that against them.
Children had better watch out.
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
“I play it back over and over,” said the woman with silver hands. “Every damn time it’s the same. I just put my hands on a stump”—laying them with a clunk on the table—“and say, ‘Yes, father’. That reminds me.” She has been going out with a man with chicken feet. He crams them into motorcycle boots and looks normal until they take off their clothes.
“Is that a problem for your sex life?” the performance artist asks.
“No,” says the woman with silver hands, “I like his feet. I mean, my hands seem to like them, I can feel it.”
“I want to introduce you to my brother,” said the performance artist. “I mean he’s gay but you’d never know.”
The woman with silver hands wasn’t listening. “He sleeps with an axe beside the bed — the window to the fire escape doesn’t lock, he says, but I think he’s tempting me to cut his feet off. Want a pear?”
The performance artist likes the lips of the woman with silver hands — a woman who could eat a pear off a tree with her stumps tied behind her back. She imagines balancing on a bed in boxers and socks, holding a pear by the stem, with the woman with silver hands on her knees before her. Later the woman with silver hands could climb a tree and throw down first her earrings, then her belt, then her boots, then her underpants, until she was naked as a pear.
“Thanks,” says the performance artist, and takes a sweet, juicy bite, and without thinking about it, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Now she will have to go fix her lipstick.
WEAVING
Reading, your gaze is moving from left to right, left to right, left to right, like a shuttle across a loom. The page is a figured cloth, swan black, swan white.
ETYMOLOGY
L. texere, to weave; from which we derive textile, and text.
CARELESSNESS
The performance artist has tea at a sidewalk cafe with the woman with silver hands. Her own healing hands are silvery with scar tissue. “Now I can ask,” she says, but doesn’t. She is watching a pigeon strut and bob, his neck fat with desire. The harried-looking female pecks at a pebble, then suddenly flaps away. The performance artist smiles, inexpertly, and turns back to her friend. “To lose one hand might be regarded as a misfortune,” she says; “to lose both looks like carelessness. I’m quoting. Ish.”
“I was trying to jump a freight train with some friends, a girl I met in the shelter, an older guy who said you could get all the way to Reno that way and that it was cool. They made it, I didn’t.” She stirred her tea with a silver finger.
“Really?”
“No, my father cut them off with an axe. Otherwise, he said, the devil would wrap his tail around his, my father’s, neck and drag him away.”
“Sucks for you.”
“Yep. Though. ” They look at her hands.
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
She looks in the mirror and says, Oh for fuck’s sake, and starts wiping her mouth with mean strokes. She has smeared her lipstick again; she has even managed to get some on her chin.
Or, she has just had oral sex on a hot afternoon with the woman with silver hands, who has previously pulled out her ghastly tampon by the string and slung it whooping out the window (later they would peer out and see it lying on top of the neighbor’s air conditioner, like a dead mouse, and burst out laughing), and has slid up for a kiss that tasted like iron and salt, and caught sight of herself in the shards of mirror glued to the wall, a red halo around her mouth.
Or, she has eaten her own children. The children she made with the art critic. But who disappeared over the course of the six years she spent making shirts out of nettles. Little shirts that would no doubt fit the children she also made. She had suspected her dealer, whose jealousy — of her own artists! — was well-known. But she could not voice her suspicions, since she was not speaking at the time.
Across the room, she sees her dealer speaking to the art critic. He is bent forward to hear her in the noisy room, his head almost touching her breasts, which are offered up in a fashion not so much sexual as maternal.
Someone is talking about a glass mountain that has sprung up in midtown, or maybe it’s just a new building by that architect, the one who did that thing in Barcelona. For some reason she is suddenly sure that that is where her children, that is, her brothers, no, her children, have gone.
The art critic has some difficulty with one of the miniature pork chops that are circulating on platters, and the dealer wipes his mouth for him in a fashion not so much maternal as sexual, though he is certainly at least half her age.
The art critic has a big head and longish, floppy, wavy hair like a cellist. He catches her eye from across the room and raises his plastic cup to her, sloshing a little sparkling water over his wrist. The light shines in his brown hair as if something golden were nestled there.
