Sub Rosa, page 26
“I didn’t join this club to talk about the bad stuff,” Dearest interrupted her. “I vote we have a happy-memory-only rule.”
Portia let out a deep sigh. I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed with Dearest or relieved to be cut off before her memory got any darker. “I inherited my mother’s vanity set,” she said.
“Wow, a hand mirror and hairbrush?” asked Dearest.
“Mirror, hairbrush, perfume bottle, and powder pot. All pewter.”
“Were they engraved with flowers?” asked Dearest.
I looked over at Isabella; she was checking her awful watch. “You can’t leave until you’ve had a turn,” I told her, and we all looked toward her. There was an uncomfortable pause before Isabella spoke. I offered what prompting I could, gently mentioning the orphanage, the nuns. I called her Brianna.
“I threw a good punch,” Isabella said finally, dead serious. Dearest gasped. The same nuns that ran the orphanage had enrolled Isabella in Catholic school, even though her hair was far curlier and her skin, back then, was noticeably darker than all the other students. She had never thought of them—not a one—until Portia mentioned confirmation, the procession of robed pre-teens walking up the church aisle to kneel at the altar. Then she remembered Jenny Lynn, the other girl who sat in the back of the church, who also sat at the back of the classroom. Jenny arrived at school with a knee-length kilt like the rest of the girls. Then, throughout the day, Jenny’s kilt got shorter and shorter. Isabella saw her rolling it up at the waistband under her desk. When the recess bell rang, Isabella would pass by Jenny’s empty chair and sometimes there would be two sweaty thigh prints left behind, glistening slightly. One day, Jenny passed Isabella a note: Are you looking at my legs?
The gymnasium storage room was their kissing spot. Isabella had previously used the room to hide from the other students during lunch hour. She’d made a fort out of dusty hockey nets and school banners. She stabbed holes in basketballs, cut weak spots in the climbing ropes. Only a few minutes after bringing Jenny to her hide-away, the pair were kissing. Isabella’s very first kiss. Jenny tasted like pot smoke and watermelon bubblegum and a better heaven than their religious studies teacher could ever describe.
When one of the popular boys called Jenny fat, Isabella punched him square in the nose. Like a red finch through an open cage door, his blood took flight. It sprayed his white uniform shirt; Isabella’s cheek was splashed with red. “No one mess with Brianna,” she remembers someone shouting as the boy crumpled to the ground. A grin crept across her face as she described the scene for us. “I wish I had that blood-stained shirt as a souvenir. Is that sick? I shouldn’t even think that sort of thing.”
“Anything goes, here. It’s our club,” I said.
“Except sad memories,” Dearest slipped in. I gave her the stink-eye and, for once, she caught on. “You punching that boy isn’t sad,” she backtracked. “It’s pretty funny, right?”
“I’d do anything to see Jenny Lynn again.” She was giddy—each of us was.
“I can’t even remember what a morel tastes like anymore,” said Dearest.
“I’ll have Al order some for the Mayflower,” offered Portia, but Dearest shrugged, saying they wouldn’t be fresh. “I’m not sure how big my father’s nose is. Or the shape of his mouth.” Portia traced her own mouth with her finger. “I wonder if he loved me. I’d like that. I’d like him to say, You’re the apple of my eye, just like fathers are supposed to tell their daughters. It makes me tingly just thinking about it. How strange.”
“I’m tingly too. And hot.” Isabella fanned herself with the skirting of her nightie. “These memories make me more flush than sex with the live ones.”
“They’re better than when the seamstress gets a new dress catalogue,” said Portia.
“It’s almost as good as when Maria puts out the fresh baked goods in the morning,” added Dearest. “Maybe better.”
In that moment the members of the Cherished Memory Club were friends, close and true, although after the meeting we knew that each of us would return to our separate Glory routines. Dearest plucked a violet from her potted garden and tucked it into a buttonhole on Isabella’s nightie. “These grow in … April, I think.” I hated to think of Isabella marching back to the grey-washed mansion. Dearest didn’t want her to leave either. She had forgotten the flower’s name, and begged us to stay until she remembered. “As soon as I’m by myself again, I’m afraid my mind will go blank. Just a few more minutes. Please. I’ve just got to know the name of this purple flower. If I think about it hard enough ...” Isabella checked her watch again and Portia politely got up to leave. Dearest’s voice regained its usual whine, knowing she couldn’t delay us any longer. I wondered how long it had been since anyone actually listened to her.
“We’re doing this again? We have to,” said Dearest.
“Even if we wanted to, I doubt we could stop,” said Isabella.
“Unless we run out of memories,” said Portia. It struck us then that getting caught wasn’t the club’s biggest threat—it was failing to remember. “Can that happen, Little? What if I only remember my dad’s tattoos, but I never have that memory of him telling me he loves me?” Portia unconsciously plucked a leaf from a nearby plant, tearing it up into tiny green shreds as she spoke. “How long did it take you to come up with all those visions of the city, Little? The ones you told the Night Watchman? And are you still having memories? You didn’t share any memories at this meeting. It’s not because you’ve run out, right?” asked Portia. The others leaned forward for my response.
“I haven’t run out,” I said. “Some of those city places I’ve seen with Arsen, and the others, they kind of appear in my head like stray pictures. They’re there all the time, in fact, ever since I came back from my trip to the Dark. There is this one I see again and again.”
“What is it?” Isabella asked.
“It’s a set of weathered concrete steps, painted red. Except the red paint is all chipping away. At the top of the steps, there’s a lawn chair made out of orange and brown nylon woven over a rusted aluminum frame.”
“And?” asked Isabella. Dearest was about to tuck a second purple flower behind Isabella’s ear.
“And nothing,” I said. “That’s it.”
“You’ve been seeing the same steps since you’ve come back from the Dark? Doesn’t that strike you as totally weird?” asked Portia.
“Well, who do the steps belong to? Is it your childhood house?” asked Dearest.
“Can you see anything else? A number on the house? A name on a mailbox, maybe?” asked Isabella.
“I can’t say,” I interrupted before they asked more questions. “It’s like all my city memories. I see them so clearly. So clearly they actually bug me sometimes. Like I can’t get them to stop. But I don’t know what they have to do with me. I don’t personally remember being at any of these places.”
“How do you know they really exist, then?”
“I guess I don’t,” I said. Isabella looked disappointed. She and Portia exchanged sceptical glances.
“Great,” cried Portia. “So, pretty much, we can’t predict how long these memories will last and we don’t even know if they’re real or not. You may as well call all of us unmemorable.”
“Oh, mine are real,” said Dearest, now holding a collection of tiny purple flowers in her hands. “This violet is real,” she said, remembering the flower’s name. “We’re not going to run out of memories. I remember stuff all the time.” No one was terribly reassured by Dearest’s conviction.
“Unmemorable means we, ourselves, aren’t worth remembering,” Isabella corrected Portia.
Portia threw her arms up in a frustrated shrug. “Is there a difference?”
Isabella pulled me to her outside Dearest’s door. “My memories are real, too, right?” she questioned. “Little, you saw my newspaper with your own eyes.”
“Believe me,” I assured her. “Your newspaper is out there in the Dark.”
XXIV
Underneath the living room sofa sat a wooden cigar box filled with money. It was one of First’s many secret deposit spots. I hastily counted out $6,000 while First toasted us bagels for breakfast.
She bounced up to me carrying two new Royal Doulton Bunnykins china plates, each stacked with bagels with cream cheese and lox and sliced fresh fruit and a melting scoop of crème fraîche that nearly slid off the plate as she placed it on my lap. It was the first time she’d served me breakfast in weeks, maybe months.
The day before, we had dropped a small fortune at the Pawnshop. First spent the morning putting her books back on the shelves in the library, humming and whistling as she did. “We ought to spruce up the Wifey Wing. What do ya say, Little?” she had asked, though it wasn’t really a question. She already had her splashy pink crocodile bag in hand, ready to lead me down the front steps. She had bought everything I looked at; the Bunnykins china set, the Chinese war horse in a shadowbox wall-hanging, the Depression glass decanter, a pair of gold hoop earrings for each of us, and a Hawaiian quilt so that we could finally re-do Second’s old bed. “We’ll send the whole lot of stuffed animals away with a live one to give them to poor city children, or something nice like that,” she’d said. She must have been on to me. I was getting too spoiled for a regular weekday afternoon.
Why, all of a sudden, would three Third wives—the babies of each family—start spending so much time together? All of the Firsts must have suspected. Our excuses got more complicated and implausible. The Cherished Memory Club meetings continued as planned, no matter how sloppy our alibis were. I was going bankrupt paying Isabella phoney live-one money. Even as First and I finished our morning bagels and set down our new Bunnykins plates, I was calculating how many club meetings I could buy Isabella with six grand. Numbers bounced around in my head as First babbled to me about our weekend plans, her feet planted just inches away from the hidden cash. I wondered how much I could pinch without her noticing. Missing money would only be one crumb in the trail the Cherished Memory Club was leaving along Sub Rosa.
Portia had started a journal. Not an account of day-to-day life on Sub Rosa, but a Cherished Memory journal. Dear Journal, the first page read. Today we had a stupid Geography quiz. Mr Debeau expected us to memorize all major rivers and lakes in North America. I’m pretty sure I did good, except for I spent too long on the Mississippi. I started daydreaming about thunderstorms. When I was a little girl, my father taught me that whenever I saw lightning to spell Mississippi. If I only got to m-i-s before the thunder struck, that meant the storm was coming closer. If I could spell the whole word, then the storm was moving away. It’s probably bull crap. But whenever I hear Mississippi I get that song in my head—m-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i. And I can almost hear the rain coming down.
“It’s a memory inside a memory,” Isabella marvelled when Portia read it at the club meeting.
But when she started writing in her journal at the Mayflower, while sitting in her booth with Likka and Myra, I grew nervous. Portia claimed she was writing a fantasy romance novel, the kind that often littered the triplet’s table. If she cracked a smile while remembering she’d say, “I’m writing a love scene.”
“Read it!” Likka and Myra requested.
“Not until I’m finished.”
I doubted it would be very long before Likka and Myra’s patience ran out and they snatched the journal away. Portia was smart, though. She kept her sisters busy by commissioning them to illustrate the novel. Gradually the collage of pop stars was torn down from the Mayflower window and was replaced by pen-and-ink drawings of bare-chested men holding swords and women warriors riding on the backs of sabre-toothed tigers.
The evidence of Dearest’s memories wasn’t contained in a book. Hers exploded over half a Sub Rosa block. She remembered a new flower, the morning glory. A harmless enough name for a flower. Within twenty-four hours, Dearest’s underground garden supplier had the seed pods in her hand, and an overexcited Dearest planted them in the offering tar along their track patch. Thin green shoots rose up almost instantly. They danced with life like charmed snakes, twisting and twirling, until they found the brick wall to cling to. Glories gathered outside the House of Man to marvel. Beside the multitude of cut flowers brought by live ones or the struggling roses at the Mansion, flora was a bit of a novelty on Sub Rosa. There was chatter in the Mayflower the day the morning glory vine produced a string of bell-shaped white flowers. Days later, the vine climbed half way up the House of Man, and began to blanket the Babycakes wall mural. Later still, Dearest’s track patch was turned into a tangle of morning glory. Fauxnique and Second Man tripped on it. Maria, the baker, got her feet caught in it. Its heart-shaped leaves vibrated in the sun as if laughing at us. Dearest would yank up one vine and three more sprang up in its place. Soon the entire building was choking in white flowers.
As usual, Dearest’s explanation was naïveté—a cover easily bought by everyone. “How could I know?” Dearest whined to the crowd of disapproving Glories. “The live one said he had magic Glory beans, so I offered them to our track patch.”
Second Man was given a pair of hedge clippers and a ladder and was put in charge of terminating the vine. He begrudgingly accepted a pair of filthy gardening gloves from the Dowager and got to work. The Firsts pulled up patio chairs and watched. Shirley brought out lemonade for them. Dearest watched too, humming a spirited tune under her breath. Sometimes she was a bit smarter and more wicked than she seemed. “You should give him your magic touch while he’s up that ladder,” she giggled at me. “Come on, just a little poke.”
Only sweet Isabella’s hands remained clean. She hadn’t lied to her sisters. She hadn’t contemplated stealing from her house. But anyone with eyes could see that she was different. She was still a black smudge in the Sub Rosa panorama, but side-by-side with the other orphans, her ability to be a perfect carbon copy was failing. Her elegant Gothic Lolita uniform weighed heavily on her. Isabella’s hemline seemed higher, her stockings sheerer. She sashayed while the others marched. When she could, she’d slip in secret moments together with me. Pouncing on me as I picked up our laundry at Launderlove, the two of us tripping as we kissed. She was acting out her former self, the schoolgirl, I believed, because her kisses weren’t orphan sips anymore. They were full mouthfuls.
“When can we go to the Widower’s again?” she said loudly. I had to shush her before sending her back the Mansion. She lifted up the back of her skirt as she walked away. Her stiff black girdle was gone, swapped for girlish cotton panties, pink and white and patterned. “Daisies,” I gasped. There were daisies on her underwear. The sight of them made me dizzy.
Daisies followed me throughout my day—floating daisy-shaped spots in my eyesight whenever I blinked. Daisies appeared in my dreams at night. They sang songs like drunk men do, making messes of words, slurring, bearing fire and grit. I had arrived at Sub Rosa wearing daisy-print panties and bra. The set still lived in the bottom of my wardrobe drawer, crumpled beneath the layers of silk knickers and nightgowns trimmed in tulle. They had survived the city. The pilled cotton-blend fabric and warped underwire had out-survived memory, out-survived the story of my life.
My happiness for her was cut with longing. Her memories of Jenny were so vivid that she felt them on her skin. I could almost feel Jenny on my own skin when Isabella held me close. I wanted Isabella to be touching me constantly. It thrilled me, but I had no memories of my own like those. There were barely any people in my memories. The more I tried to hear Nino’s voice or see Eli’s face, the cloudier the memory became. The one tangible memory of an actual person was the lampshade lady, my grandmother. She spoke to me. Her voice was a smoker’s rasp, thin yet kind. I’d travel back into the Dark to hear that voice again, I thought. The horrors of that place felt powerless in comparison to my longing for memory.
I wandered outside the Dowager’s Mansion at sunrise. Then again before lunch. After dinner. Between live ones throughout the night. Isabella wasn’t on her track patch. The morning after, she was missing from the orphans’ morning chores. I thought I spotted her by the tool shed behind the Mansion, but it was only a black rain slicker hanging from a nail. I started determinedly across Diamond’s property. Why be afraid to ask after her? And I wasn’t about to dumb it down either. “Can Isabella come out and play?” No, Diamond wouldn’t be hearing that from me, I told myself for courage.
The orphans were hunched in a row along the garden path, an assembly line of weeding. One lifted her head from her work to warn me, “Go back.” She blankly lowered her head again and returned to her weeds. It may as well have been the voice of the wind, a stone gargoyle, or lifeless tree speaking to me. My black pearl ring felt hot on my finger. The sky suddenly seemed supernaturally dark. I ran, like I had run from the Dowager’s front veranda so long ago, frantic and ungainly on my feet. Any other Glory would have giggled at the site. Not the orphans. I left a wake of eerie silence behind me.
“What in heavens has got into you?” asked First as I tore past her in the living room.
“Nothing,” I said. And for once she left it at that.
“Nothing” is what I told her again as we stood out on our track patch at night. I was squirming in my spot, fixed on the Dowager’s property.
“Don’t tell me nothing,” she scolded, holding her authoritative carnelian red fingernail inches away from my nose. “You are up to something.”
“Please, First,” I pleaded. She was breaking my concentration. Phantom hand was perched at the bottom of the Mansion drainpipe, ready to climb. In its grip was a note I had written: Are you ok? It had made it across the street and past the line of orphans. My fingers tickled as it crept through the brittle grass on Diamond’s front lawn. I had never sent it so far before. A dull headache spread between my eyes as I sent it up and up, to the second-floor window. It hesitated on the windowsill for several moments, rapping its ghostly hand on the glass. I saw the window open, just a crack, the person who opened it unseen behind the heavy velvet curtains. But who else could it have been besides Isabella? Phantom hand entered the Mansion. My own hand went numb.
Portia let out a deep sigh. I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed with Dearest or relieved to be cut off before her memory got any darker. “I inherited my mother’s vanity set,” she said.
“Wow, a hand mirror and hairbrush?” asked Dearest.
“Mirror, hairbrush, perfume bottle, and powder pot. All pewter.”
“Were they engraved with flowers?” asked Dearest.
I looked over at Isabella; she was checking her awful watch. “You can’t leave until you’ve had a turn,” I told her, and we all looked toward her. There was an uncomfortable pause before Isabella spoke. I offered what prompting I could, gently mentioning the orphanage, the nuns. I called her Brianna.
“I threw a good punch,” Isabella said finally, dead serious. Dearest gasped. The same nuns that ran the orphanage had enrolled Isabella in Catholic school, even though her hair was far curlier and her skin, back then, was noticeably darker than all the other students. She had never thought of them—not a one—until Portia mentioned confirmation, the procession of robed pre-teens walking up the church aisle to kneel at the altar. Then she remembered Jenny Lynn, the other girl who sat in the back of the church, who also sat at the back of the classroom. Jenny arrived at school with a knee-length kilt like the rest of the girls. Then, throughout the day, Jenny’s kilt got shorter and shorter. Isabella saw her rolling it up at the waistband under her desk. When the recess bell rang, Isabella would pass by Jenny’s empty chair and sometimes there would be two sweaty thigh prints left behind, glistening slightly. One day, Jenny passed Isabella a note: Are you looking at my legs?
The gymnasium storage room was their kissing spot. Isabella had previously used the room to hide from the other students during lunch hour. She’d made a fort out of dusty hockey nets and school banners. She stabbed holes in basketballs, cut weak spots in the climbing ropes. Only a few minutes after bringing Jenny to her hide-away, the pair were kissing. Isabella’s very first kiss. Jenny tasted like pot smoke and watermelon bubblegum and a better heaven than their religious studies teacher could ever describe.
When one of the popular boys called Jenny fat, Isabella punched him square in the nose. Like a red finch through an open cage door, his blood took flight. It sprayed his white uniform shirt; Isabella’s cheek was splashed with red. “No one mess with Brianna,” she remembers someone shouting as the boy crumpled to the ground. A grin crept across her face as she described the scene for us. “I wish I had that blood-stained shirt as a souvenir. Is that sick? I shouldn’t even think that sort of thing.”
“Anything goes, here. It’s our club,” I said.
“Except sad memories,” Dearest slipped in. I gave her the stink-eye and, for once, she caught on. “You punching that boy isn’t sad,” she backtracked. “It’s pretty funny, right?”
“I’d do anything to see Jenny Lynn again.” She was giddy—each of us was.
“I can’t even remember what a morel tastes like anymore,” said Dearest.
“I’ll have Al order some for the Mayflower,” offered Portia, but Dearest shrugged, saying they wouldn’t be fresh. “I’m not sure how big my father’s nose is. Or the shape of his mouth.” Portia traced her own mouth with her finger. “I wonder if he loved me. I’d like that. I’d like him to say, You’re the apple of my eye, just like fathers are supposed to tell their daughters. It makes me tingly just thinking about it. How strange.”
“I’m tingly too. And hot.” Isabella fanned herself with the skirting of her nightie. “These memories make me more flush than sex with the live ones.”
“They’re better than when the seamstress gets a new dress catalogue,” said Portia.
“It’s almost as good as when Maria puts out the fresh baked goods in the morning,” added Dearest. “Maybe better.”
In that moment the members of the Cherished Memory Club were friends, close and true, although after the meeting we knew that each of us would return to our separate Glory routines. Dearest plucked a violet from her potted garden and tucked it into a buttonhole on Isabella’s nightie. “These grow in … April, I think.” I hated to think of Isabella marching back to the grey-washed mansion. Dearest didn’t want her to leave either. She had forgotten the flower’s name, and begged us to stay until she remembered. “As soon as I’m by myself again, I’m afraid my mind will go blank. Just a few more minutes. Please. I’ve just got to know the name of this purple flower. If I think about it hard enough ...” Isabella checked her watch again and Portia politely got up to leave. Dearest’s voice regained its usual whine, knowing she couldn’t delay us any longer. I wondered how long it had been since anyone actually listened to her.
“We’re doing this again? We have to,” said Dearest.
“Even if we wanted to, I doubt we could stop,” said Isabella.
“Unless we run out of memories,” said Portia. It struck us then that getting caught wasn’t the club’s biggest threat—it was failing to remember. “Can that happen, Little? What if I only remember my dad’s tattoos, but I never have that memory of him telling me he loves me?” Portia unconsciously plucked a leaf from a nearby plant, tearing it up into tiny green shreds as she spoke. “How long did it take you to come up with all those visions of the city, Little? The ones you told the Night Watchman? And are you still having memories? You didn’t share any memories at this meeting. It’s not because you’ve run out, right?” asked Portia. The others leaned forward for my response.
“I haven’t run out,” I said. “Some of those city places I’ve seen with Arsen, and the others, they kind of appear in my head like stray pictures. They’re there all the time, in fact, ever since I came back from my trip to the Dark. There is this one I see again and again.”
“What is it?” Isabella asked.
“It’s a set of weathered concrete steps, painted red. Except the red paint is all chipping away. At the top of the steps, there’s a lawn chair made out of orange and brown nylon woven over a rusted aluminum frame.”
“And?” asked Isabella. Dearest was about to tuck a second purple flower behind Isabella’s ear.
“And nothing,” I said. “That’s it.”
“You’ve been seeing the same steps since you’ve come back from the Dark? Doesn’t that strike you as totally weird?” asked Portia.
“Well, who do the steps belong to? Is it your childhood house?” asked Dearest.
“Can you see anything else? A number on the house? A name on a mailbox, maybe?” asked Isabella.
“I can’t say,” I interrupted before they asked more questions. “It’s like all my city memories. I see them so clearly. So clearly they actually bug me sometimes. Like I can’t get them to stop. But I don’t know what they have to do with me. I don’t personally remember being at any of these places.”
“How do you know they really exist, then?”
“I guess I don’t,” I said. Isabella looked disappointed. She and Portia exchanged sceptical glances.
“Great,” cried Portia. “So, pretty much, we can’t predict how long these memories will last and we don’t even know if they’re real or not. You may as well call all of us unmemorable.”
“Oh, mine are real,” said Dearest, now holding a collection of tiny purple flowers in her hands. “This violet is real,” she said, remembering the flower’s name. “We’re not going to run out of memories. I remember stuff all the time.” No one was terribly reassured by Dearest’s conviction.
“Unmemorable means we, ourselves, aren’t worth remembering,” Isabella corrected Portia.
Portia threw her arms up in a frustrated shrug. “Is there a difference?”
Isabella pulled me to her outside Dearest’s door. “My memories are real, too, right?” she questioned. “Little, you saw my newspaper with your own eyes.”
“Believe me,” I assured her. “Your newspaper is out there in the Dark.”
XXIV
Underneath the living room sofa sat a wooden cigar box filled with money. It was one of First’s many secret deposit spots. I hastily counted out $6,000 while First toasted us bagels for breakfast.
She bounced up to me carrying two new Royal Doulton Bunnykins china plates, each stacked with bagels with cream cheese and lox and sliced fresh fruit and a melting scoop of crème fraîche that nearly slid off the plate as she placed it on my lap. It was the first time she’d served me breakfast in weeks, maybe months.
The day before, we had dropped a small fortune at the Pawnshop. First spent the morning putting her books back on the shelves in the library, humming and whistling as she did. “We ought to spruce up the Wifey Wing. What do ya say, Little?” she had asked, though it wasn’t really a question. She already had her splashy pink crocodile bag in hand, ready to lead me down the front steps. She had bought everything I looked at; the Bunnykins china set, the Chinese war horse in a shadowbox wall-hanging, the Depression glass decanter, a pair of gold hoop earrings for each of us, and a Hawaiian quilt so that we could finally re-do Second’s old bed. “We’ll send the whole lot of stuffed animals away with a live one to give them to poor city children, or something nice like that,” she’d said. She must have been on to me. I was getting too spoiled for a regular weekday afternoon.
Why, all of a sudden, would three Third wives—the babies of each family—start spending so much time together? All of the Firsts must have suspected. Our excuses got more complicated and implausible. The Cherished Memory Club meetings continued as planned, no matter how sloppy our alibis were. I was going bankrupt paying Isabella phoney live-one money. Even as First and I finished our morning bagels and set down our new Bunnykins plates, I was calculating how many club meetings I could buy Isabella with six grand. Numbers bounced around in my head as First babbled to me about our weekend plans, her feet planted just inches away from the hidden cash. I wondered how much I could pinch without her noticing. Missing money would only be one crumb in the trail the Cherished Memory Club was leaving along Sub Rosa.
Portia had started a journal. Not an account of day-to-day life on Sub Rosa, but a Cherished Memory journal. Dear Journal, the first page read. Today we had a stupid Geography quiz. Mr Debeau expected us to memorize all major rivers and lakes in North America. I’m pretty sure I did good, except for I spent too long on the Mississippi. I started daydreaming about thunderstorms. When I was a little girl, my father taught me that whenever I saw lightning to spell Mississippi. If I only got to m-i-s before the thunder struck, that meant the storm was coming closer. If I could spell the whole word, then the storm was moving away. It’s probably bull crap. But whenever I hear Mississippi I get that song in my head—m-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i. And I can almost hear the rain coming down.
“It’s a memory inside a memory,” Isabella marvelled when Portia read it at the club meeting.
But when she started writing in her journal at the Mayflower, while sitting in her booth with Likka and Myra, I grew nervous. Portia claimed she was writing a fantasy romance novel, the kind that often littered the triplet’s table. If she cracked a smile while remembering she’d say, “I’m writing a love scene.”
“Read it!” Likka and Myra requested.
“Not until I’m finished.”
I doubted it would be very long before Likka and Myra’s patience ran out and they snatched the journal away. Portia was smart, though. She kept her sisters busy by commissioning them to illustrate the novel. Gradually the collage of pop stars was torn down from the Mayflower window and was replaced by pen-and-ink drawings of bare-chested men holding swords and women warriors riding on the backs of sabre-toothed tigers.
The evidence of Dearest’s memories wasn’t contained in a book. Hers exploded over half a Sub Rosa block. She remembered a new flower, the morning glory. A harmless enough name for a flower. Within twenty-four hours, Dearest’s underground garden supplier had the seed pods in her hand, and an overexcited Dearest planted them in the offering tar along their track patch. Thin green shoots rose up almost instantly. They danced with life like charmed snakes, twisting and twirling, until they found the brick wall to cling to. Glories gathered outside the House of Man to marvel. Beside the multitude of cut flowers brought by live ones or the struggling roses at the Mansion, flora was a bit of a novelty on Sub Rosa. There was chatter in the Mayflower the day the morning glory vine produced a string of bell-shaped white flowers. Days later, the vine climbed half way up the House of Man, and began to blanket the Babycakes wall mural. Later still, Dearest’s track patch was turned into a tangle of morning glory. Fauxnique and Second Man tripped on it. Maria, the baker, got her feet caught in it. Its heart-shaped leaves vibrated in the sun as if laughing at us. Dearest would yank up one vine and three more sprang up in its place. Soon the entire building was choking in white flowers.
As usual, Dearest’s explanation was naïveté—a cover easily bought by everyone. “How could I know?” Dearest whined to the crowd of disapproving Glories. “The live one said he had magic Glory beans, so I offered them to our track patch.”
Second Man was given a pair of hedge clippers and a ladder and was put in charge of terminating the vine. He begrudgingly accepted a pair of filthy gardening gloves from the Dowager and got to work. The Firsts pulled up patio chairs and watched. Shirley brought out lemonade for them. Dearest watched too, humming a spirited tune under her breath. Sometimes she was a bit smarter and more wicked than she seemed. “You should give him your magic touch while he’s up that ladder,” she giggled at me. “Come on, just a little poke.”
Only sweet Isabella’s hands remained clean. She hadn’t lied to her sisters. She hadn’t contemplated stealing from her house. But anyone with eyes could see that she was different. She was still a black smudge in the Sub Rosa panorama, but side-by-side with the other orphans, her ability to be a perfect carbon copy was failing. Her elegant Gothic Lolita uniform weighed heavily on her. Isabella’s hemline seemed higher, her stockings sheerer. She sashayed while the others marched. When she could, she’d slip in secret moments together with me. Pouncing on me as I picked up our laundry at Launderlove, the two of us tripping as we kissed. She was acting out her former self, the schoolgirl, I believed, because her kisses weren’t orphan sips anymore. They were full mouthfuls.
“When can we go to the Widower’s again?” she said loudly. I had to shush her before sending her back the Mansion. She lifted up the back of her skirt as she walked away. Her stiff black girdle was gone, swapped for girlish cotton panties, pink and white and patterned. “Daisies,” I gasped. There were daisies on her underwear. The sight of them made me dizzy.
Daisies followed me throughout my day—floating daisy-shaped spots in my eyesight whenever I blinked. Daisies appeared in my dreams at night. They sang songs like drunk men do, making messes of words, slurring, bearing fire and grit. I had arrived at Sub Rosa wearing daisy-print panties and bra. The set still lived in the bottom of my wardrobe drawer, crumpled beneath the layers of silk knickers and nightgowns trimmed in tulle. They had survived the city. The pilled cotton-blend fabric and warped underwire had out-survived memory, out-survived the story of my life.
My happiness for her was cut with longing. Her memories of Jenny were so vivid that she felt them on her skin. I could almost feel Jenny on my own skin when Isabella held me close. I wanted Isabella to be touching me constantly. It thrilled me, but I had no memories of my own like those. There were barely any people in my memories. The more I tried to hear Nino’s voice or see Eli’s face, the cloudier the memory became. The one tangible memory of an actual person was the lampshade lady, my grandmother. She spoke to me. Her voice was a smoker’s rasp, thin yet kind. I’d travel back into the Dark to hear that voice again, I thought. The horrors of that place felt powerless in comparison to my longing for memory.
I wandered outside the Dowager’s Mansion at sunrise. Then again before lunch. After dinner. Between live ones throughout the night. Isabella wasn’t on her track patch. The morning after, she was missing from the orphans’ morning chores. I thought I spotted her by the tool shed behind the Mansion, but it was only a black rain slicker hanging from a nail. I started determinedly across Diamond’s property. Why be afraid to ask after her? And I wasn’t about to dumb it down either. “Can Isabella come out and play?” No, Diamond wouldn’t be hearing that from me, I told myself for courage.
The orphans were hunched in a row along the garden path, an assembly line of weeding. One lifted her head from her work to warn me, “Go back.” She blankly lowered her head again and returned to her weeds. It may as well have been the voice of the wind, a stone gargoyle, or lifeless tree speaking to me. My black pearl ring felt hot on my finger. The sky suddenly seemed supernaturally dark. I ran, like I had run from the Dowager’s front veranda so long ago, frantic and ungainly on my feet. Any other Glory would have giggled at the site. Not the orphans. I left a wake of eerie silence behind me.
“What in heavens has got into you?” asked First as I tore past her in the living room.
“Nothing,” I said. And for once she left it at that.
“Nothing” is what I told her again as we stood out on our track patch at night. I was squirming in my spot, fixed on the Dowager’s property.
“Don’t tell me nothing,” she scolded, holding her authoritative carnelian red fingernail inches away from my nose. “You are up to something.”
“Please, First,” I pleaded. She was breaking my concentration. Phantom hand was perched at the bottom of the Mansion drainpipe, ready to climb. In its grip was a note I had written: Are you ok? It had made it across the street and past the line of orphans. My fingers tickled as it crept through the brittle grass on Diamond’s front lawn. I had never sent it so far before. A dull headache spread between my eyes as I sent it up and up, to the second-floor window. It hesitated on the windowsill for several moments, rapping its ghostly hand on the glass. I saw the window open, just a crack, the person who opened it unseen behind the heavy velvet curtains. But who else could it have been besides Isabella? Phantom hand entered the Mansion. My own hand went numb.
