Sub Rosa, page 25
There was.
That night I discovered there was wondering besides mine. Portia approached me as I lingered on my track patch. It was rare that we both had a lull at the same time. Rarer still to see her alone. I stumbled out an awkward greeting as she wandered over. I noticed she was a little long in the torso, a little short in the legs. She walked like a Slinky, a wide sway in her hips with each step.
“I made this for you,” she said. “If it reminds you of your grandmother, then you should have it.” She held out a hand-folded greeting card with a sparkly four-leaf clover stamped on the front. Her fingertips were stained inky green. She didn’t let go as I took the card in my hand and both of us stood there.
“Ling is calling you,” I said, looking over her shoulder. Ling was waving her long arm in the air. I could hear her snapping her fingers. Portia finally let go of the card and ran back to the Mayflower.
Her card read: My father had a shamrock tattoo on his arm and a fighting leprechaun and an Irish harp. When he flexed his bicep the leprechaun would dance. It always made me laugh. Your friend forever, P.
XXII
“How am I supposed to get away?” Isabella grumbled as we rode home. I shushed her. The orphan had become terrible at keeping her voice down. The cabbie glanced in his rear-view mirror; I was convinced he had overheard us. If he leaked this to Treasure Anne, our secret would be out. So I got closer to Isabella, rested my chin on her shoulder, and continued the hushed conversation.
“You are away,” I said, gesturing at the boulevard stretched behind us. “It’s not that hard.”
“Only because I’m working.” In this hopeless mood, Isabella could bury herself in the back seat of a cab. Upholstery turned to grains of sand beneath her. Her body was a sieve. The scenery kept its distance from the car window. The sky, the passing cars, the city lights—none wanted anything to do with our dilemma. I swear the branches of trees twitched each time I looked out at them, losing leaves as we passed.
During the seven days between our visits to the Widower’s house, I had founded a club. The Cherished Memory Club—a darn good name, I thought. There were three members already: Isabella, Portia, and me. We had agreed on one rule: secrecy. No one but members could know about the club, except on one condition. If we had not just a suspicion but proof that another Glory was actively and fondly remembering her pre-Glory past, then, and only then, could we break the vow of secrecy and divulge information about the club. In private, I wished First would somehow fit this description. She knew every last secret about me, or at least all the secrets I remembered.
First had no idea I was planting notes for Isabella under rocks in the Dowager’s garden. She paid little attention when Portia and I took up pin-ball at No’s. I almost wanted her to catch me.
Isabella had the opposite problem. We stood in the middle of Sub Rosa after the cabbie ejected us from our temporary meeting place. “There isn’t anywhere Diamond won’t come looking for me,” Isabella said.
I might have tried to seduce Eddie Junior into hiding us out at the Smoke Shoppe, except, thanks to Second, Eddie was hesitant to let any of us in through the back door. What a waste of an impressionable heart he had turned out to be. “I’m not allowed to play pinball, anyway,” sighed Isabella.
Even if Isabella had the freedom to roam Sub Rosa, there wasn’t a single spot where we could meet without stirring up gossip. An orphan hanging out with a triplet! What would we tell the others we were doing together?
“There is a place where we’d be completely hidden,” I said, turning to the Dark horizon. It wasn’t the clubhouse I’d dreamed of. There’d be no scrapbook making or family portraits painting or show-and-tell in the Dark. But if the Cherished Memory Club could claim a birthplace, the Dark was it. “Your newspaper is out there,” I reminded her. If that blind wasteland held Isabella’s newspaper, it must be holding other artefacts from the past. I had an insistent suspicion that the Dark was as likely to give a girl memory as it was to give her amnesia. So much of the city—my city—had returned to me since my last visit to the Dark, memories that I craved proof of.
Isabella took my hand. “It does somewhat beckon, doesn’t it?”
“It hums. If you listen, you can hear it all the way from here.” The Dark’s hum was a thousand voices scrambled into hypnotic white noise. A ribbon loosened itself from Isabella’s hair and blew down the centre of the street. Isabella only ran a few steps to catch it before giving up. The red velvet ribbon rose higher and higher, twirling mad circles in a breeze that carried it to the Dark.
“You’re not going back out there, are you?” Dearest stood beside us, pink watering can in one hand.
“Don’t creep up on us like that,” I snapped.
“I wanted to show you my flowers,” She motioned to her track patch. “Come see the row of violets I’ve trained to grow between the cobble stones.” Isabella, too polite to ignore Dearest’s request, followed her toward the House of Man. Dearest took the opportunity to natter away at her. “Every day I wished, so hard, for violets,” she chirped. “Just like in my front yard when I was I kid.” Isabella looked over her shoulder at me, wide-eyed.
“Dearest,” I said. “Do you want to know a secret?”
XXIII
The first Cherished Memory Club meeting took place at the House of Man early on a Saturday morning. Saturday, because every Friday night Fauxnique and Second Man stayed in the city at decadent live one parties or weekend getaways, and Dearest had the run of the house. It was a cinch to convince her to host. She was alone too much for her own liking and was starved for company. And she had nothing to lose. Hers was the newest House on Sub Rosa, and also the least strict. No one minded what Dearest did. Not like with Isabella, and not like with me.
First was spread out on the sofa reading an encyclopaedia all about insects. “I hear the Mayflower is making black cherry and chocolate pancakes now,” she said. “I’ll get up and take you right after I finish this section on centipedes.” I had counted on her being housebound until noon, as she had the past several mornings. There was no way to slip past her.
“Dearest invited me over to her house for breakfast,” I told her. “I don’t think all this alone time is so good for her. Makes her needy and strange. I know! Why don’t we invite her to come with us? I bet the company of a First is just what she needs.”
“Oh,” said First, closing her eyes for a moment, weighing whether or not she could put up with Dearest first thing in the morning. “Go on ahead to your friend’s house. Have your girly times.” First smiled and blew me a kiss. Dearest wasn’t a threat—that was one good thing about her. Even the Dowager was allowing Isabella over to Dearest’s house. Of course, I had a different, and more elaborate lie to make that arrangement. “Now hold on a second,” First called after me before I was out the door. “What do you think you are doing?” I nearly bolted down the stairs, pretending I didn’t hear her question. “You gonna put some clothes on?” she asked, to my relief.
My cropped cardigan barely covered the baby-doll nightgown I was wearing. It did, however, conceal the money I had folded between my breasts. “I can’t wear my good clothes. Dearest is always latching on to me with her sticky fingers. And the triplets say Fauxnique never cleans.” First folded her arms in front of her chest and cocked her head at me. “Do you really think Dearest will care?” I asked.
“I suppose not,” First said reluctantly. “But unless you wanna be insultin’, don’t you go there in p.j.s when Fauxnique’s around.”
Outside, the Dowager was waiting at the end of her garden path with Isabella. They managed to make holding hands a scene completely devoid of affection. Isabella trembled ever so slightly, like a toy poodle at the end of its leash. Her pyjamas were all frills and embroidered flowers, at least three layers worth, and came down past her knees. I told the Dowager that this live one didn’t like the colour black, just so I could see Isabella dressed in something different.
“Where is this live one?” the Dowager demanded, searching the street for parked cars.
“On his way,” I said. “He requested that we all be tucked into our sleeping bags, sleeping, so he can pretend he’s Dearest’s older brother crashing her slumber party.”
“Juvenile role play,” Diamond scoffed. “My girls rarely entertain such tastes.”
“Isabella will be perfect. She’s small, impish even. Virginal. Selfless. Effortless to work with.” I felt sleazy rating Isabella’s Glory qualities while she stood right beside me. But it did the trick; Diamond released her into my care.
“Mind the time, Isabella,” the Dowager called after us as we walked arm and arm. There was a watch on Isabella’s wrist.
“She told me I have no internal clock,” Isabella whispered. “And that our trips to see the Widower are too long. Now I have to wear this.” She held up her wrist, and the two of us looked at the watch in mild disgust. What did it matter if our dates with the live ones lasted too long? Since when was anyone on Sub Rosa preoccupied with time?
When Isabella rang the doorbell at Dearest’s, I caught her checking her watch. I pushed through the door and began to climb the stairs. I didn’t see the need for formalities with Dearest. Their stairwell smelled so strongly of the bakery below that I began salivating. No wonder Dearest had a sweet tooth. I stopped Isabella half way up and unbuttoned my cardigan. She stared at the floor, embarrassed.
I had had to beg her to go along with the plan: to pretend the Cherished Memory Club meeting was a date with a live one. I promised to give her the payment from my own money. I took a deep breath; my chest swelled as I pulled the bills from my nightie. It was easy to talk about giving it to her. As I did, however, I felt a pang of regret. First so rarely let me keep my money. An unimaginable sum of cash was tucked away in hiding spots, but my own purse was rather meagre. I looked again at Isabella’s watch and wondered if the Dowager forced her to buy it with her own money. A watch and a warning, that’s what her Glory work got her. I towered two steps and a pair of high-heeled pompom slippers above her. She touched my bare leg, traced a tiny circle behind my knee. You don’t have to, was what she was about to say. I gave her the money before she had a chance to.
Isabella’s kiss was finite. Not like First’s—First’s mouth was a wide-open entrance to an inexhaustible world of delight. But, reminiscent of my kiss with First, ours was the kiss of complete choice. I had nothing to gain from it. I wasn’t sure if that gave it more or less value, only that it had been so long since I had done the choosing. I curled my tongue around Isabella’s upper lip and held on for a final second. Our lips made a popping sound as we separated.
She sneezed as we reached Dearest’s door. “Bless you,” I said instinctively; we were both puzzled. “Who sneezes on Sub Rosa?” I asked.
The entire House of Man apartment was covered in flowers. Moss met our feet as Dearest greeted us. Whole stretches of floor were covered in rock and dirt and moss and flowers. Hollyhocks and honeysuckle, snapdragons and daffodils. Flowers with no regard for season— crocuses and Queen Anne’s lace grew side by side. Sweet peas vined up the walls. Spanish moss hung from the ceiling. Isabella sneezed again.
Portia was stretched out on a green velvet sofa. I don’t know how long she had been there, but her mouth and eyes were still gaping at her surroundings. “This is worth sneaking around for,” she said. “Likka is totally on to us, by the way.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That I was going to clean the spray paint from Advent Alley. I said I thought red-lettered messages might attract unwanted attention. Al’s out there right now doing it for me, dirty old goat.”
“And the car?”
“Don’t worry, my new best friends. I’ve arranged for Ling’s regular to park outside of House of Man. He’ll be here in … wait for it …” Portia lifted an authoritative finger in the air and sure enough, we heard a car pull up outside. Our alibi was sound.
“Our garden,” Isabella sneezed again, “is—”
“Completely pathetic. Yeah, we know.”
“Gardening is what I do in my spare time,” said Dearest, showing Isabella to a toadstool-shaped ottoman. “Aren’t flowers great? If I wasn’t a Glory, I would definitely want to be a flower. I’ve been gardening since I was born.” I took a deep breath, we all did, knowing Dearest was about to launch into a drawn-out childhood memory. I figured she deserved her due time; she had provided us with a clubhouse, after all.
“It all starts with dirt,” Dearest told us, her eyes squeezed shut as if she was about to be presented with a surprise gift. “Soil. Peat moss. Manure. Mulch. Coconut hulls. Sand. Black and crawling with earthworms, red and packed tight like clay.” She counted these gardening ingredients on her fingers.
“Mother was a gardener. She wasn’t pretty, like me. She smelled like grass clippings. She whistled snippets of tunes as she scrubbed her hands with honey oatmeal soap at the end of the day. She never had manicures. Honey oatmeal soap, that’s all.
“I got to ride in wheelbarrows when I went to work with her. I’d sit in the biggest gardens, watching Mother trim branches and pull weeds. The ladies who employed her brought me lemonade or, if I was lucky, freezer bags filled with bridge mixture. ‘Are you helping Mummy today?’ they’d ask. They couldn’t resist my cute pigtails and smile. I’d go home with candy in my pockets. Mother never kept sweets in the house. She made me eat yogurt for dessert. So I had to hide my candy in my room.
“On Sundays, me and Mother would drive right to the city centre. We had a stand at the farmer’s market. You see, that was Mother’s real job—she was a mushroom farmer. She loved mushrooms, isn’t that silly? What I liked about the market was I got to be the very first one to buy the morning’s pies and tarts. We were there so early, before the sun came up. We’d load up mother’s van when it was still dark, and by sunrise city people would be forming a line to buy our mushrooms. We were the only mushroom farmers at the market. ‘Are they wild?’ someone always asked. I waited for that question. Mother always had the same answer. ‘We try to train them, but, alas, they can’t be house broken.’ I must have heard her say that a thousand times.”
Dearest shared her home, on sixteen acres as she remembers, with mushrooms. Her mother spent long hours in the barn mixing corncobs and horse manure and straw with a pitchfork, then mixing spores into the compost with a fine-pronged rake. Long sacks of oyster mushrooms hung from the beams like body bags. The barn was steaming and warm and put Dearest to sleep if she spent too long in there.
Not too far from her mother’s house there were craggy rock faces that sweated cool water for Dearest to climb. There were ferns and snapdragons and Douglas firs shouldered up to one another. There were scrawny maples that vied for room but never reached the canopy. But mushrooms reigned. “Shelf fungus stuck to the side of our house,” Dearest exclaimed. “Slippery Jacks took over any sick or fallen tree. Morels arrived in the spring. Pine mushrooms in the fall. Mother was always hunting our land for mushrooms. I didn’t really like going with her. The soil was so damp it could swallow up my legs, pulling the gumboots off my feet.” Dearest was convinced that if she stayed still for too long, mushrooms would have taken her too, grow along her spine, suck her bones hollow.
“Bridget Grace Catherine McCrudden,” Portia said suddenly, leaping off the end of Dearest’s last sentence. Any fungal odour I’d conjured quickly dissipated with Portia’s words and turned to jealousy. How was it she could so surely state her name? Four names, no less! “Everything about me is in my name,” she said. McCrudden was Irish. McCruddens claimed to come from the coast of the Irish Sea, though there’d been no ocean anywhere near her kin for generations. The only brackishness Portia’s McCruddens knew was drinking Bloody Marys from salt-rimmed glasses.
She picked the name Catherine when she confirmed her devotion to the Catholic Church. “Confirmation is the last of four steps,” she explained. “Baptism, first communion, first confession, and confirmation.” She was one of four girls in her eighth-grade class who picked Saint Catherine of Siena as their confirmation name. The week before the confirmation ceremony their social studies class put the Great Depression on hold so they could study the lives of saints. “Saint Catherine walked barefoot in the Vatican. It was a really big deal. She was a total bad ass. She taught herself how to read. She had her own gang of ladies that helped the poor and the sick! Like outlaw, sexy nurses for God!” Portia liked Saint Catherine because she referred to God as being pazzo d’amore, crazy with love. Portia was crazy with love for Matt Knocksworth, who wore rock concert T-shirts under his school uniform, goats’ heads and guitars subtly showing through his monogrammed Oxford shirts. For Matt, Portia stole cigarettes from her father’s nightstand and sips of whiskey from the bottle on top of the fridge. She let Matt finger bang her three times. Each time she swelled up so much she worried she’d stretch her white cotton underpants. “Now, if any of us Glories had a sore pussy, there would be something wrong with us. But trust me, with Matt, it was exciting!” she told us.
She wore a white robe at the confirmation ceremony with a red banner that spelled out “Catherine” in felt letters. Her class walked down the aisle past relatives and teachers taking pictures. She’d already genuflected before the altar and took her seat in the front pew before she noticed her father wasn’t there.
Grace was her dad’s mum. It had taken Portia years to realize this, because she always called her Nan. “Christmas/Easter Catholics” was what Nan called Portia and her dad because they only went to mass twice a year, on those two holidays, then once for her mother’s funeral. Bridget had also been her mother’s name. “My dad stopped calling me anything at all after she died,” said Portia.
