The younger woman realizes she’s stumbled irrevocably into a conversation. “Were you here before the lake?” she finally asks.
She doesn’t know who I am, Lulu thinks, trying to consider this in all its aspects. Or rather: I don’t know what she knows: does she know what she knows? Just as well she doesn’t know me as Mistress Lulu … but then does she know I’m her mother? Did she really return to me by sheer accident? “What’s your name?”
The younger woman flushes, narrows her eyes. After a moment she says, “You know.”
“Tell me.”
“You know. You said it last night.”
“Tell me.”
After a moment the girl says, “Brontë.”
Lulu turns back to the eggs on the oven. “Yes, I was here before the lake. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you been here long?”
Brontë seems to meditate on the question. “No,” she finally answers.
“Visiting?”
“Yeah.”
Don’t pry so much, Lulu tells herself now, you’re prying. What were you doing in the water last night? “Family or friends here?” She puts the eggs on the table in front of the girl who begins devouring them. “Boyfriend?”
“No boyfriends,” Brontë says emphatically between bites. She’s sucking on slices of lemon, one after another, until it makes Lulu’s mouth sour to watch her.
“You don’t like boys?”
Well, not in that way, the girl thinks to herself. I like them
through his arcane and unhinged calculations but the meaning of which
all right, but not in that way. Actually I’m into girls — and I almost say it, as much for the shock value, you know? Because actually at this point I’m a bit afraid of this woman cooking me breakfast, whoever she is. I’m trying to act cool and it’s true about the girls but if I were to say it, it would only be to try and perhaps intimidate her back a bit, though as I’ll find out soon enough that’s hardly the sort of thing that would. Intimidate her, that is. So I don’t say it, and the way she keeps checking out my chest just makes me think all the more perhaps I shouldn’t say it, because at this point I still can’t tell about her, here I am out in this old hotel out in the middle of this lake stuck here for the moment and also, to be honest, not all that ready to leave, it seems a pretty mega place really, a terrace you can walk out and see a big part of the bay, water stretching far out to sea in the west, hills curving ’round to the north and that big battleship or whatever it is out in the distance, the one tall building that’s not gone under. It’s all something to see isn’t it and I’ll never get tired of it, so already I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind so much not having to leave right away.
Even from the first the Mistress, she seems a bit off, I must say, as much as I come to love her. Naturally later I understand some of it a bit better, later clients they’ll tell me there was a time not so many years ago she was the most powerful woman in the territory with an army of submissives, and then there’s all the religious business going on ’round her, but I don’t know what her story is this first morning except she’s called me a name I’m not really sure is mine and she’s checking out my chest, which I’m selfconscious about anyway. So they’re a bit big. If I was taller they wouldn’t seem so big. It’s not really they’re so big it’s that the rest of me is small. My chest and height I’m selfconscious about. If it was up to me I’d like to take a bit off the front and put it on top.
Later when I get to know her better and realize it’s a
remained an infuriating and impossible mystery to him and everyone else, and
mother thing with her not a lover thing, I tell her about being into women and she laughs and calls me God’s little joke on the male gender. Perhaps so. The boys they do check me out and want to be with me and we all know what that’s about, and I don’t think it’s taken me much of my life to figure that out. It’s funny what I sort of remember from before and what I don’t. As time goes by, some things come back to me but they’re just isolated pictures in my head of a city street though not this city, a thousand shops, a thousand cars and lights and towering buildings — but it’s all another lifetime. I still remember things about myself like being selfconscious, I have this sort of sense of who I am even if I don’t remember the name, and for a while I confess it scares me, it seems important doesn’t it, but honestly? I don’t know that it’s so important, if you think about it. Perhaps my name really is Brontë, it’s not as though it’s impossible. That night the Mistress pulled me out of the water, brought me in, gave me a place to sleep, I felt so strange about everything and awhile there in the water at the end I seriously thought I was about to drown. And when you seriously think you’re about to drown, all the little chambers of your mind become one big room, all the walls between things that happened long ago and not so long ago, things you’ve felt badly about perhaps or things you’re sorry you didn’t get to do I suppose, all the walls come down and memory, it becomes this big open mezzanine, to the extent you’re actually thinking any of that at all as you’re trying to keep from drowning. Except at that moment, when all the little chambers of my mind opened up and all the walls came down, I couldn’t see a thing, though at the time I wasn’t conscious of much other than trying to stay alive. I was looking at what was revealed in that moment, and nothing was revealed. The big open mezzanine of what I remembered from my life was just dark and empty.
So I was sort of — I’m sure when I first get here I’m a bit
which I couldn’t be expected to remember but which I know at this very
hysterical, I’m sure I’m in some sort of shock. At first I don’t know where I am or how I got here and I’m exhausted and scared, and lying in that strange dark room that used to be the Mistress’ ceremony chamber, how do I know it’s not my name when she calls me that? I still don’t know. Later I actually read the books and I’m not sure which she named me after but I like Emily the best, the one about the girl who drives the boy crazy and then even when she dies she goes on driving him crazy, yes I like her best.
So I know at once the Mistress she’s a bit off but I also decide she’s probably all right too, and it becomes obvious it’s a mother thing. She says something a couple of times that, when I think about it, seems a bit odd, we’ll be talking about the business, the clients and what not, and she says in self-reproach, “What kind of life is it, for a mother to leave to her daughter?” Later after I’ve been here awhile and when I think she knows I won’t get too put off by it, that’s when she tells me how those first nights after I arrived at the Chateau she would come into the chamber while I slept on the mat, sitting and watching and even talking to me. I had no idea. I never heard anything but then I’m a very sound sleeper. I was talking to you, she’ll say, but you were sleeping the sleep of the dead, and perhaps that’s the first real memory I have of before, I can remember someone else saying that. Because that’s exactly what I sleep all right, the sleep of the dead. And if the Mistress isn’t in any hurry for me to leave then I’m not in any hurry to go, not back out there into the lake I came from. I love the Chateau, feel safe here, protected from the lake and after awhile I feel protected by the lake, from the world. I surely don’t feel any great urge to go back and find out things about my life or my past or wherever I came from, to the contrary there’s something a bit lovely about the feeling of starting fresh. What happened before that would make me feel I want to start fresh? Well all right that