Miz Verlow’s voice softened. “You need an aspirin, Calley.”
She drew me along with her, through a door and into an ell of the house and down a hallway and into a bedroom. I was surprised to see her open a door into another bathroom. This bedroom—hers, it came to me—had its own private bath. She came out of the bath with a damp washrag, a glass of water and a small orange pill.
The little orange pill may have been the first aspirin I ever had. Certainly I have no memory of such a thing even existing in the house in Montgomery. This aspirin was not only orange in color; it had a tang of orange and grittiness on my tongue that raised goose bumps on my arms.
She picked up a small bottle from the dresser and poured a few pearly drops into one palm. After rubbing her palms together, she very gently worked the stuff from the bottle through my hair. She massaged my scalp the way I did Mama’s feet at night. The pain in my head began to fade. Then she combed my hair and tied up my ponytails. It didn’t hurt a bit.
“How about some ribbons?”
One second, one long piece of yellow ribbon draped her fingers and the next, there were two, flickering away from the blades of the shears with a cool faint whisper. The shears were very sharp, sharp enough to take off a finger or a foot, and well oiled too, for the pivot of the blades moved with only the slightest of sounds. The whole ribbon fell hypnotically into two perfectly equal parts between the flash of the two blades.
“Who was the lady who left this morning?”
“I thought you would never ask. Why do you think that she was wearing her hat to obscure her face?”
“So I would ask who she was.”
Miz Verlow laughed softly. “You are sharp as the blades of my shears, Calley Dakin.”
My tongue was suddenly thick in my heavy head, my eyelids impossible to lift.
THE sound of the dinner bell woke me. I had no memory of falling asleep. My neck was stiff and damp and I was hungry. It seemed to me that the dinner bell was my hunger, ringing right inside my head and in my stomach.
Now warmed by my body heat, the damp washrag sat like a deflated old toad on my forehead: I flung it off. The pillow was damp from my wet hair. So heavy had my sleep been that I had drooled a little. My earlobes and behind my ears and my neck were crusty with the tracks of it.
I slipped off the bed and went into the bathroom to pee and wash my face. A small high window was propped open to the salt air and the intricate conversation of birds and sea and wind. The room itself was imbued with a complex aroma, something like a spice cupboard all mixed up with a medicine cabinet.
The yellow ribbons around my ponytails shone back at me in the mirror over the basin. My swollen face was muddy with bruises. The yellow of the ribbon was exactly the wrong color; it made my hair more colorless, my skin hectic, the discoloration of the bruises violent. My head hurt again just looking at myself. When I felt in my pocket for my broken glasses and Betsy Cane McCall, I found nothing.
But I was so hungry, I was hollow clean through.
I found my way back to the foyer and the dining room and would have gone onto the kitchen but Miz Verlow was there at the table, with Mama and the guests who wanted dinner, and she stopped me with a commanding look.
“Miss Calley Dakin,” she said, “you are late. Beg pardon, please, and take your seat.”
She indicated a chair with the slightest of gestures of her head.
“Beg pardon,” I tried to say but it came out all thick and clogged as if I had a cold.
Mama snickered.
No one else did.
I fell on my dinner as the wolves on the Assyrians—at least that’s the way I remember it, wolves on Assyrians—ate everything on the plate Cleonie put down in front of me: ham steak and red-eyed gravy and cornbread, and creamed corn and scallop potatoes and green beans cooked with side meat, and bread-and-rice pudding with whipped cream. I drank three whole glasses of sweetened lemonade. To the consternation of the guests, to Mama’s horror and humiliation, to Cleonie’s wrinkled nose, and to Miz Verlow’s apparent indifference, I finally slid woozily off that chair and vomited on the turkey rug.
“Concussion,” said Miz Verlow shortly. “Put the child to bed.”
Twenty-eight
WHEN the first morning birds woke me, I was tangled in a coverlet on the floor. Mama was asleep in the bed. Horrid dreams had fevered my night. I did not want to recall any detail. When I finally did, I wished heartily that I had not.
My first concern was thirst. At that very early hour, I had the use without challenge of the bathroom we shared with other guests. I gulped from the tap like the barely domesticated little animal that I was. And then I did the opposite and relieved myself.
I became aware of feeling a little less substantial, a little lighter on my feet. After splashing my face and head, I brushed the sick taste of my nightmares from my mouth. A few strands of my hair fell into the basin, into the foam of toothpaste spat.
My hair was loose, the ribbons and rubber bands left on Mama’s dresser, along with the gap-toothed comb that she had assigned me since I had lost mine. My scalp felt lighter than usual. I was a fright, of course: my eyes half-closed with swelling, my nose like a moldy potato. I made a face in the mirror and stuck out my tongue at myself.
When I crept back into the bedroom, intent on getting my clothes and scooting out again, Mama was just stirring. She opened one eye, saw me, moaned, and turned over, yanking a pillow over her head.
I dressed as swiftly and quietly as I could. The rubber bands, the yellow ribbons, the comb, all waited on the dresser. It felt as if they were watching me: the rubber bands gasping, the comb gnashing its uneven teeth, the ribbons flickering like snakes’ tongues that would burn when they bit. I slipped out without touching them and with an intense sense of having escaped.
Cleonie and Perdita were in the kitchen already, Miz Verlow in conversation with them, so I was able to creep out of doors unseen and unheard.
The light edging over the eastern horizon brightened the foam on the breakers in the west to a dazzling pure white. A fleet of pelicans flying parallel to the shore passed almost silently over my head, throwing their huge shadows over me and onto the white sand. They seemed very close and very large. My relative small size enlarged them to enormity.
Up and down the beach, at watch in the swash, stood solitary herons—harrings. Suddenly I understood Cleonie’s pronunciation. As I approached the nearest, it seemed entirely indifferent to me and yet was aware of me; I saw it in its eyes and heard its heartbeat surge. It too was a large bird, taller than I was, but its legs were stilts, its long neck as thin as my wrist, its head no bigger than my fist. A long, thin inky slash of droopy feathers atop its skull, and the long feathers on its chest, ruffled in the breeze.
A law firm of birds waded in the swash or near it: sander-ling, dunlin, dowitcher, sandpiper, willet, stilt and avocet. Pelicans, skimmers, terns and gulls hunted just offshore.
As I squatted barefoot on the beach, a breeze ruffled my hair, and took away a strand. And then another.
A fish crow screeched a loud awk and hurtled toward me. It passed over my head with its claws outreached, snagged lightly, and was gone. I did not need to see the strands in its claws to know that it had taken some of my hair. The interesting sensation was the absence of resistance from the hair. It was painless. The hair went quite willingly where it was tugged. It no longer felt rooted or connected to me in any way.
I made an uhhk at the fish crow. In a black vortex, a dozen or more fish crows hovered over me, diving toward me, skimming away a few strands of hair at a time, rising away again. My scalp felt more and more naked. The sea breeze passed as a cool ruffling through thinner and thinner locks. The birds played around my head acrobatically, teasingly, and their wings fanned me from every direction until I heard nothing else. Some of their cries sounded like questions—uhuh-uhuh? Others like answers—brruhk. My throat grew dry from conversing with them, and then they were gone.