Читать книгу The Magnetic Girl - Jessica Handler - Страница 11
ОглавлениеLIGHTS HYPNOTICALLY BLUE PULSED BEHIND MY closed eyelids, inside the farthest reach of a soft black cave. They were like the soul of a flame, and I wanted to capture them in my hand. If my head hadn’t hurt so much, I might have laughed. The lights receded and returned at their own will, their glowing blue a fixed pinpoint in a miasma of splintering pain.
The headaches had started to come on once a month sometime last year; at first tentative and not every time, but by now I could expect them the third week of every month, along with the rags that I washed out in private, the pain like rodents gnawing my hip bones, and a relentless need for sleep. Sleeping, I dreamed of sunflowers turning their pocked faces to the sky. I dreamed of starved, blighted ground absorbing water as fast as it could flow.
The worst headaches kept me in bed. I couldn’t stomach the cup of broth or tea that Momma brought upstairs. Toasted bread might as well have been tree bark on a flowered plate. Momma learned quickly not to waste butter on the bread. The oily smell made me weep with disgust.
At first, Momma lay cold cloths on my head. They were too heavy, and when she left I tossed them to the floor. I tried to dress but reaching for my clothes made me want to run for the basin. I buttoned my dress unevenly and left my hair prickled like an angry cat’s back. Shaken by the effort, I lay back on the bed. Cold, I pulled the covers up. Hot, I peeled them back.
“Momma,” I wept, but my wail emerged in a whimper.
“Momma,” I tried again, gathering effort.
Momma was downstairs. Daddy had stayed away, made nervous by the physical demands of femaleness.
“Rub my back,” I whispered to the empty room. Momma’s cool hand and strong grip would help, but she didn’t hear me. I inched my arm behind my head and pressed my fingertips into the rigid muscles at the root of my neck. My headache receded, but the blue flame danced vividly in my sightline, the color somewhere between indigo and cobalt, the texture a mix of satin and velvet.
Electricity pulsed in the air between my body and the world beyond. I slept.
When I woke, night had fallen. My curtains and the window over the wash basin were open to the air. Momma must have come in. I heard the sounds of supper downstairs; low conversation, a chair scraping the floor. Leo laughed, a dish clanked.
I went to the open window. Hands on the sill, I leaned my head against the wooden mullion. I was muscle-sore and drowsy, but my head no longer hurt, and my stomach was still. The air drifting in over my hands was warm from the day and smelled like cut hay and wet dirt. I caught the distant rich scent of manure, and the remainder of cooking smells: fat and boiled greens.
What if the view out this window wasn’t darkness, but streaked blue with electrical light? How far could I see with electricity? If I rode a streetcar with blue light crackling out of wires overhead, how far would I go?
A WEEK HAD PASSED since Dale’s departure, and The Truth of Mesmeric Influence was still in my room. I read every night and went about my business during the day as if I weren’t learning far beyond my school work. Still, Mrs. Wolf occupied my thoughts so much that one morning I nearly stepped on Daddy’s boot when I backed out of the chicken coop.
“Missy, you and I will speak privately,” he said, flat. “Put the eggs in the kitchen. You have five minutes.” Anger shimmered around him.
He turned and stalked into the house, his back rigid, his hands balled into fists. I never took a book from your shelf, I could say. I’d been so careful putting everything back and covering the slim empty space on his shelf. This might not be about the book at all.
The walk to the back door, up the steps, and into the kitchen helped me count off what else might cause his anger. Right foot down; Leo was with Momma, so there was no neglect there. Left foot down; Mr. Campbell might have found the courage to tell him what I’d done in Sunday school, but Mr. Campbell wasn’t the type of person to admit something he didn’t understand. With each step a new idea arose, with the next, the idea was discounted. In the kitchen, the eggs went into a bowl, and I covered them with a cloth. They’d go into bread dough later. I left the kitchen door open. I could always run.
My father’s chair creaked in his study, and he called my name.
Wishing I were so small that my steps were silent, I went to his doorway. He didn’t look up from his ledgers. The way he sat, I could see his blond hair thinning on the top of his head, and I wanted to look away. He kept writing in his ledger. When he finally looked up, his mouth was set in a tight line. My stomach sank.
“Give it,” he said.
For a long second, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t know what he meant. But I knew. On the shelf, the space where The Truth of Mesmeric Influence had been was blank as a missing tooth. If I spoke up and pointed out that the very fact that I’d picked that single title from the shelf meant that it was destined for me, Daddy would have laughed.
“My book, Lulu.” His voice was steel. “Leo certainly didn’t take it.”
I hated when he dug at Leo.
“The Truth of Mesmeric Influence is mine, Lulu. You know I don’t go in for that stupidity, but that book belongs to me and it’s not here. I didn’t lose it and your mother doesn’t care for it, which leads to the obvious deduction that you took it.”
Daddy slapped a ledger shut, a smack I could feel on my face. All I could say was that I was sorry. I was sorry. I wished that I had stayed blessedly beside Leo that afternoon, untroubled by a cousin, or myself, or anything at all.
He took a sheet of paper from his desk drawer and pushed it toward me. He pointed to his bottle of ink and his pen. His pocket watch ticked. I was on the high end of a seesaw in mid-lift, bracing myself to slam to the ground. Daddy sighed. He acted as if I were a child incapable of forming clear sentences, untrustworthy in my intentions. His word for what I’d done was “took.” Not my word. Mine would be “borrow.”
“You’ll apologize to your cousin,” he said. “Right here, you’ll write a letter to Dale explaining how you made her act the fool and how sorry you are to have upset her.”
She’d come in here a fool, and a vicious one, too. That wasn’t my doing. Daddy had never said one word to her about her rude remarks at supper the night I did what I did with the pin. A person who didn’t know him would think he’d forgotten it, but I didn’t see how he could have.
“Write.” He pushed the paper toward me. “Dale left out of here sure we were experiencing the work of the Lord first-hand. You need to set that girl right and not have her telling a lie before God and everyone.”
“Dear Dale,” I wrote. This was as far as I got for several minutes. Dear Dale.
Dale would show this letter to girls I’d never meet. They would pass it among themselves, and who knows where gossip would take it after that. I’d be the butt of their jokes, and I wouldn’t be there to captivate those girls and make them mine, even if only for a beautiful minute.
“I am sorry to tell you this but there was no work of the Lord from my hands in our house in Cedartown when you were our guest. I am afraid that I let my poor nature get the better of me.”
If I could only tell those girls, “Oh, I was only playing a trick on Dale. She’s so easy to fool, bless her, that I couldn’t help myself,” they would laugh sweetly and rest their arms across my shoulders. They’d invite me to their homes, where the walls were freshly painted and the cushions plump, and we’d take a refreshing jaunt in the buggy after dinner.
“Momma said that what happened in my bedroom came from electrical orbs, and I regret to tell you that I neglected to speak up and so let my mother make a false statement. There was no electricity or work of the Lord. The scarf was also my doing.”
No, I’d never leave here. I would watch Leo all his days and marry some fellow who’d never been anywhere and had no wish to travel. I’d set up a home with him, and itch for the rest of my days for the freedom that came from doing what no one else around me could do.
“I pray that you will understand and forgive me, and I remain, Your loving cousin Lulu.”
I blotted the letter and handed it to Daddy. He would make me change it, probably more than once as a lesson, and then carry it into town during the week to mail.
He took the letter and leaned toward me across his desk. Instinctively, I leaned away.
“When you were six,” he said, “I found you outside before dawn. I was on the way to milk the cow and nearly tripped over you sitting on the porch steps. You told me that you wanted to hear the sun come up. You had gotten yourself dressed, even tied a ribbon in your hair, and there you sat.”
I remembered. He’d gone pale when he saw me.
“I wanted to holler at you,” he said. “Get up, be useful, go fetch some water or feed the dogs, don’t sit like a stone, but you were sitting exactly like a stone, looking to the distance, one hand on each knee, your little back straight as a board.”
I remembered thinking that when the sun rose, he would hear it, too.
“When you finally did move,” Daddy said, “you asked could I hear it. I heard birdsong, and I’m sure the cow was shifting around in the barn. You were close to crying, Lulu, and when I reached for you, you pushed me away.”
I remembered the torn-open feeling when I understood that no one else knew what it felt like to be me.
“Your hands were hot as melting candle wax that morning,” Daddy said, shaking his head. “I only wish I’d been honest with myself on that day about the power that you and I can wield together.”
With this small recognition, waves of stories poured from me. I told him about reaching into Dale’s trunk in the moments she’d turned her attention to her beloved hat box, and how I wadded up her scarf and shoved it into my blouse just for fun. I told him about captivating the fox and saving Leo from the animal’s attack, about Mr. Campbell, about how Mrs. Wolf wrote that I could learn to undo the damage done to Leo. I told him about how when I learned to do that, time would go backwards to the days when we were happy, and no one looked at me as if they couldn’t remember why I was there.
Daddy rose and turned to the bookshelf. I talked faster, distracting myself from the gap where The Truth of Mesmeric Influence should have been. He picked through the books on his shelf, pulling one out, sliding it back, examining another. First, the leather-bound Bible, then worn almanacs that dated back to 1866, the year he came to Georgia from Tennessee. One after the other, the collected words of Shakespeare, two hymnals. Daddy spoke quietly, his back to me.
“Yours were careless actions,” Lulu,” he said. “You say you can stare into someone’s eyes, make them believe one foolish thing or another that they already had buried in them, but that’s not real power.”
What did my father know of power, of the beauty in stopping time? Because of the book that all but jumped into my hands.
“Why do you have a book about Mesmerism?”
“Why I have any of my books isn’t your concern,” he said, selecting a slender cloth-bound volume from his shelf.
“While you were writing, I got to thinking. You seem to be allowing yourself to become a liar and a thief. However, in the right hands, those same skills can be shaped into a gift.”
“Thank you,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“You’ve got a gift,” he repeated, “and all gifts are God-given. Even the thief and the gambler are skilled at their trades, although we know that their duty is to overcome sin and turn to good works.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Had the Devil risen out of the floor right then, I would have offered him coffee.
Daddy smiled, the real, wide smile of the days before we moved to the farm, the days when we were four whole people. He passed the book over to me. The cover showed a turbaned man whose eyes were drawn to look like they glowed. Lightning shot from his brow. Modern Marvels of Alchemy paraded above his head in gold and black lettering. He was foreign and malevolent, and he was magnificent.
“This is what you’ve made an attempt at doing,” he said. He looked at the turbaned man on the book cover as if he were a long-lost friend.
“Science, Lulu. You’re going to learn science in the evenings, not some made-up hoodoo. Science is the tool with which we will forge your gift into a beneficial influence.”
He looked at the turbaned man again.
“There’s not a single excuse why some woman in Ohio with a stick has to hog the whole vista of public distractions. God has clearly given us a mission.”
The floor had opened, and I was glad for my chair.
Daddy rose from his chair and came to stand beside me.
“It’s no shame for a man to ask for God’s help,” Daddy said. He stroked my hair, making me flinch. I never enjoyed the feeling of being touched.
“Mrs. Wolf writes about healing, Daddy,” I said, working hard not to shake off his hand. “She helped souls recover from their troubles.”
Daddy crouched at my side and I was six years old again, waiting for the sun to rise, for both of us to hear the sound. For the briefest moment I feared my father would weep.
“Lulu, when I was a boy, I fell under the spell of a charlatan who held me spellbound. But I loved that person who preached that if a person is in balance, the fluids in his body travel evenly around their conduits. If a man should be unfortunate in these conduits, he falls ill, or he loses his loved ones. He becomes a victim of poverty.”
When Daddy stood, his knees cracked.
“Those magnetic fluids between the poles must be balanced, this person said.”
“Because he read Mrs. Wolf,” I answered, certain.
Daddy laughed.
“This person believed themselves right, and I swore so, too, but I was a little boy then. What I’ve learned since is that the common person will believe anything if it’s wrapped up in bows. Those of us who value our honest character are asked to be vigilant in approaching the slender line between devotion and deception.”
Daddy had never spoken about his past. His parents were dead, he had no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles. The delivery of this story alone was extraordinary. I would get no more today, maybe ever, and I averted my eyes, uncomfortable for us both. Outside, a crow called. In the kitchen, Momma chattered to Leo while she banged around at the stove. I should be there, keeping him busy, listening to him. Leo didn’t like being talked at.
“God has sent a message to me through you, my oldest child,” Daddy said. “It’s become your duty, Lulu, to study up on this gift you have. Through your hands, if we remain vigilant and honest, He will bring our reward.”
My hands. I thought of dinner: biscuits, gravy, and greens. Ribbed, pointy-tipped okra, their pale spines tearing my fingers when I picked the pods from their stalks. Our wagon needed new seats and springs. And though Leo no longer needed his terrible coal-oil lamp, he would always need help.
“I prayed for the power to help ease our financial strain,” I said. From the ever-widening crack in the floor, the Devil chuckled.
I had not prayed for this at all.
My voice rang out in that close room.
“I prayed for a way to help us all.”
“You’re a good girl, Lulu,” my father said. “You’re a good sister to Leo. Poor little boy, he’ll always be a child, and who will be here for him when your mother and I are in Glory? Just you, and you’ll be a fine sister to him no matter what becomes of our baby boy.”
Thinking of Leo’s future was agony. Until that moment, no one had outright said that he would end up in my care, but no one had to. My brother, who squeezed my heart dry, was the single reason I could not truly picture myself in the world beyond Cedartown. How would a man who couldn’t walk on his own and whose speech made no sense to strangers earn his living on a farm or in a city? Leo wouldn’t ever be able to do his business in the privy on his own.
“Mrs. Wolf says Mesmerists have a duty to use their powers to cure disease.”
Daddy toyed with my letter.
“Mrs. Wolf was deluded,” he said. “It’s a sorry thing that my own good hard work can’t lift this family higher.”
Daddy held my letter up, the sunlight flashing the page bone white. And then he tore the letter in two.
I grabbed at it, but he held the paper out of my reach.
“You can paste the letter back together and I can carry it to the post office for you, but you know how that will look when your cousin reads a letter made of scraps. That’s evidence of your trying to renounce an honest statement and then thinking the better of it. Inconsistency.”
He slipped the two halves of the letter between the pages of Modern Marvels of Alchemy.
“You can borrow the book,” he said, not looking at me.
Mrs. Wolf’s book? My heart jumped into my throat, but I stayed silent in case I’d misunderstood him. Mrs. Wolf so clearly wrote about love and charity, about the reward in our work when she began to mesmerize.
“The Mesmerist book,” Daddy added, as if he’d heard my thoughts. “Consider it a loan of light entertainment.”
I was dismissed.
Now that The Truth of Mesmeric Influence didn’t need to be hidden, where would I keep it? Leaving the book out on a table the way I would a school book or one of Momma’s novels seemed discourteous to Mrs. Wolf. Exposure to the ordinary trials of life could leach the information right out. After some reordering of the glass-tipped hairpins in my box of keepsakes and protecting the fingernail-sized window panes of mica chips by covering them with a square of fabric, the book fit into box, if I put my found buttons in each corner. The top of the box wouldn’t quite lie flat this way, but I had made a safe and sound bed nonetheless.
Who was Mrs. Wolf? There was no illustration, no lithograph anywhere in the pages, but I could hear her voice when I read. My mother’s voice clanged like a fork striking a metal bowl. My own voice was low, and sometimes I spoke so quietly that teachers asked me to speak up. Mrs. Wolf’s voice was musical, I was sure. She was an alto singer, a sound like breath blown across the top of a bottle.
She wrote, Miss Elslag, returning from her place of worship, was struck to the ground by lightning. The shock rendered her dumb, with the ability to speak only the words yes or no when asked.
She could have been telling me my own story. Miss Hurst, lying in her bed during a lightning storm, was struck by the fury inside her. Her inexplicable emotions made a connection with the transference of human energy we Mesmerists know as Magnetism.
What had happened to Miss Elslag? Momma was calling from downstairs, so I lay a glass-tipped pin against the page to hold my place, and put The Truth of Mesmeric Influence into its bed.
After supper, Momma plucked the forks and knives from my hand before I could clean them.
“Go and see your daddy,” she said. “He’s got big plans for you tonight.” She cupped my chin. “I’ll wash up. It’ll give Leo something new to look at.”
I tried to pull my face from her grip.
“Don’t you know?” she said, sparkling. “You’re a great, great gift to us.”
I nodded, my chin still in her vise. I held my breath to block the thick stink of mouths and teeth on the dirty fork tines. When she let me go, I ticked Leo’s ribs to make him laugh, and hurried to my father’s study.
He was waiting for me with a pocket notebook and a fresh pencil. He smiled to beat the band, which made me want to look behind me to see who he was really smiling at.
He laughed.
“Lulu, teaching you will be easy as pie. You’ve already seen for yourself how ready folks are for humbug if they don’t recognize what’s happening to them.”
Dale must have been ready for humbug—she was the one who’d thought up the vermin and fireballs big as thumbs. I took a seat across from his desk and tucked my fingers into my palms to keep from picking at the arm rest.
Daddy flipped open his notebook and cleared his throat.
“Your average person, if he figures out he’s been humbugged, won’t make a peep about it because he doesn’t want to admit he’s guilty of falling for the humbug,” he began.
That was true. Mr. Campbell hadn’t looked straight at me since the day I’d captivated him. He knew I’d done something, but he would never own up to it. Each time he avoided my gaze my stomach fluttered. I’d won a game that he hadn’t agreed to play.
Daddy reached beneath his desk and pulled out a broom. The straw had been stripped from the business end. From beside his desk, he kicked out a long past useful wooden chair. Someone had cut down the old chair’s legs. He pointed to the chair, and without questioning him, I went to sit in it. The thing was cut so close to the floor that I nearly had to squat. I felt more oversized than usual, as if I were a grown baby. With nothing else to do, I reached upward for the destroyed broom.
“What good is this if it won’t sweep?” I asked.
“Exactly what you’re doing,” Daddy said, mimicking how I held the broom. He extended his arms out before him, making the wooden stick the crossbar of an “H.”
There didn’t seem to be any other way to hold the broom, but fooling with the thing made no sense, and I set the broom down.
“This gift you have, making innocent people believe, is unusual in a young person. I’ve seen it work, and I’ve also seen it fail,” Daddy said. He began to pace. “Your cousin believed she saw electricity right here in our house, but I knew, and so did you, that all she saw was lightning out your window. Your sticking her with that pin gave her the go-ahead to surrender to her secret beliefs. All she needed was permission, Lulu.”
Jumping up and running out of the room was a bad idea. But he was acting like Dale, loading significance onto one stupid thing I’d done. Startling my cousin or staring into someone’s eyes until they lost their way wasn’t me giving anyone the go-ahead for what they privately wanted.
He talked on, flipping through a notepad.
“In your lessons with me, you will learn to manufacture the impression of great feats of strength,” he said. “Not hoodoo. Nothing more than understanding how people find what they desire in the simple aspects of life they observe. Also, we’ll learn some basic action of the fulcrum and the lever.”
“Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion,” I volunteered, always the good student. Mrs. Wolf already said as much. She’d written in the first few pages of her book how the mesmerized patiently observe Newton’s method. Did Daddy know that his ideas were so similar to hers?
“Your power resides in timing,” he continued. “Your success will be directly related to how you guide others in observing you. This, in turn, arises from how you observe them.”
Daddy was spellbound by his own voice, a preacher at the pulpit.
I said, “Yes sir.”
Please calm down, I prayed. Please lower your voice. Please stand still. My collar was damp, and I couldn’t catch my breath. Drowning might feel like this. My wet palms scraped my skirt, and I picked at a stray thread. Anything to focus. Back when I’d been baptized, I’d panicked under the water, but we came right up into the sun. This time, there was no welcome rush of fresh air. I shifted in my seat, sinking in his words.
“Why do you think that iron furnace runs night and day outside of town?” he asked. “The railroad men learned about the iron in our soil, and they came in and built pig-iron furnaces.”
We were going out of this room now, lifting up and away from me. I inhaled, clearing my head, but Daddy snapped his fingers in my face so closely that the air popped.
“Iron filings get attracted to one end of a magnet, repelled from the other. That’s where timing comes in. You’ve got copper and iron right here under your feet. I’ve told you how they act on each other. In the mind of the regular person, why couldn’t you also have the draw of a magnet in you? You’ve grown up right here, walked the same soil that I’ve tilled.”
“Copper is in your pebbles,” I said, thinking of his collection of stones, so nice to the touch.
Daddy applauded. I was getting close to whatever he wanted me to catch on to, but I couldn’t quite grasp it.
“Copper wire is in the battery, the telegraph, and those lights in France your cousin was crazy for. I read, Lulu. The scientific types call copper a conductor. Copper works magic on iron, Lulu.”
Suddenly, I knew.
“You want me to pretend I’m Magnetic,” I said.
“You are our Magnetic Girl.” He beamed, sweeping his hands in an arc above my head.
How a person would act magnetic I couldn’t fathom. Pretending I could conduct electricity wouldn’t do anything but make me look stupid. People I didn’t know would laugh and point, just like people I did know. They’d joke to each other about how tall I was, not caring that I could hear them. They’d talk about how my hands and feet were big as bread loaves. I only wanted to be Lulu Hurst, the girl who captivated—Mesmerized—her brother until he could walk and talk and stand tall on his own. Then I would be the girl who could leave.
“Magnetic reminds people that you’re the conduit for the copper and iron in the earth. If ‘Magnetic Girl’ doesn’t pull people into our parlor,” he said, laughing at his joke, “we can always call you the Georgia Wonder.”
My mind squeezed out single words at a time. This must be how Leo felt when he tried to talk clearly.
“Parlor?” I asked.
“There’s no whoop de do or immodesty, no hazards to anyone’s health or character. We’ll be here in our home, same as with any friend or neighbor coming to call. A more appropriate setting than Sunday School, with you attempting tricks on your teacher.”
Captivating was no trick. Sometimes captivating stopped the world.
“Why did Momma say the noises were electrical?”
Daddy laughed. “Your Momma listens too much to her friend Mrs. Hartnett. That poor lady’s addicted to her Banner of Light séance paper.”
He snatched at the air like he was catching fireflies in twilight. I’d done that same thing when I was little, reach out and cup my hand around a lightning bug, put it in a jar. I’d do this until I had a jar glowing with trapped life. The living lantern by my bedside cast a thin, otherworldly light while I drifted off to sleep. In the morning, the bugs lay dead from their futile attempts to escape. The green, bright smell they’d had when I caught them had turned to the damp stink of rotten potatoes.
“People like Mrs. Hartnett will tell you that electrical particles swim in the air, and that’s exactly the kind of person who wants to see The Magnetic Girl.”
Daddy offered the denuded broomstick to me again, holding the center, the ends pointing to the floor and ceiling. With nowhere else to put my hands, I took each end. He moved the stick as if he were turning a wheel until he had arranged the broomstick parallel to the floor.
“You will make this lifeless broomstick appear to have a heartbeat and the writhing fury of an Indian cobra snake, power enough to knock a man off his pins. The goal is to raise the question ‘is this merely a household implement, or does this innocent object surge with life?’”
“It’s just a broomstick, Daddy,” I said.
“This is no longer a broomstick,” he said. “This is a fancy walking stick: ivory-handled, made of gleaming, polished wood.”
It was still just a broomstick, but his voice resonated like an echo and I bit my lip to keep from laughing. He didn’t know that talking took away the concentration I needed to captivate.
He pushed toward me, his hands wide on the broomstick. Afraid he would snap the wood and stumble, I did the first thing that came to me: I grabbed the stick near the center to hold it steady. He pushed toward me, harder. We were playing a game I’d never seen, my father and I, with the broomstick as the prize. He was trying to snap it across the middle, and my job, clearly, was to push back and keep the broomstick in one piece.
My arms were straight out, palms on the wood and open toward my father’s chest when he released the broomstick. Without his resistance, I tumbled to my knees.
Daddy leaned against his desk, hands in his pockets. My spine rattled from my tail bone to my jaw. He’d let me fall on purpose. He’d made me fall. The broomstick was still in my hand, useless. I rolled it away from me across the floor and got to my feet.
“You let go,” Daddy said, accusing me. “You let go and allowed the electrical power coursing through that broomstick to throw you to the ground.”
My palms burned.
“You’re thinking I’ve lost my mind, but I promise you I’m sane,” he said. “What’s just happened is my demonstration of the Magnetic Power you’re going to demonstrate on others. You control the cane. They get knocked back by what they believe is its lively spirit.”
He seemed to think I could knock anyone into a cocked hat any old time. Dale’s scarf was nothing, and the two people I’d captivated were a baby and a childish teacher.
“You don’t really believe people will accept the idea that there’s power in a stick of wood when all they do is let go of it?”
He looked right and left, elaborately pretending to check for eavesdroppers. And then he winked.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is what they believe.”
He waggled his fingers at my nose.
“You carry Odic foooorce.”
He sounded ridiculous, and I laughed. We were nearly the father and daughter I believed we would be on that morning a decade earlier, on the porch before the sun rose.
Over the next week, we practiced every evening after supper. We worked on what Daddy named “tests,” a more serious word than “tricks” or “acts.” A much more scientific word than “captivating,” but that word was my own, and I kept it close to my heart.
My primary job was observation.
“Present yourself as if you were wide-eyed, not judging, not thinking, like a newborn baby,” he said as he shaped my arms into a cradle as if I were rocking a baby.
My holding an invisible baby suggested the terrible mistake I had made, the one he didn’t know. I went rigid from stifling my own fear.
“What does a baby do?” he asked, without seeing me. “A baby reacts. He is merely a vessel for what he sees and hears.”
The imaginary baby squalled to be set down gently, far away from me.
Daddy made a mark in his notebook.
“In a manner of speaking, you are a baby. What you observe in the person opposing you in a test will determine everything you do. In time, you’ll come to know what a person will do before he does it.”
I thought I already knew. Dale’s scarf proved that, and so did Mr. Campbell’s straying from his task as he led pupils in recitation.
Daddy bought a new People’s Regulator notebook for our practice sessions, and by the second evening the pages were curved from his pocket. On each page he wrote our practice date, and the numbers one to ten along both margins to rank my effort. He drew lines across the pages that slanted upward to the ten, calibrating strain. They spiked like a mountain peak if I failed on a first try. On my best days, the lines were flat and even, a well-maintained road from one side of the page to the other.
From my father, I learned to hear the way a room sounded all of its own; the creaking of a closed door, the drift of air through an open window, the shifts in tone as four walls settled on their foundations. I learned that my thoughts crowded me out of the natural state of a place.
The same broomstick returned. I practiced holding it steady between us, an equator at chest height. My father and I pushed equally toward the other, my hands at the center of the bar, his a few inches outside mine. As I pushed forward and the smallest bit upward, always matching my force to his, our balance was in my control. I learned to recognize the shiver in my stomach in the split second before he tried to outmaneuver me by pushing harder with his right or left hand or leaning away. Alert to his movements almost before he made them, I secured us both in our stances and rarely lost my footing. I grew quicker and more confident with each try. I had the broomstick trick easy from the third day, but we worked it until he was satisfied that I was more than lucky.
And then we worked with a chair; different from a stick, with a confusion of right angles that made it hard at first to figure out his intentions.
“Hold it up here,” Daddy said, pressing his forefinger to my heart.
I did as I was told, the chair protruding from my chest like a weird appendage. At my side, Daddy laid my arm across the seat, curling my fingers where knees would go. He moved my other hand to the top of the back rail. Hugging the chair to my chest made me shuffle somewhat in my balance. Daddy assessed my predicament and placed his hand alongside mine on the seat. Helping me stay steady, he lay his other hand along the slats. If the chair were a baby, he’d have burped it. This made me laugh, and my laugh got him going, too.
“Try and put the chair down, but don’t let it go,” he said.
To set it down I’d have to quit holding so tightly. Bending my knees brought the chair down some, but Daddy pressed the seat and I staggered forward. Leaning forward from the waist like an open knife elicited the same problem.
“Can’t happen,” Daddy said. “Not without you falling over.”
My arms ached, and letting go of my hold, I put the chair on the floor where it belonged.
“Think about what would happen if you were on my side of the chair, and the person where you’re standing now was sure your Magnetic Power kept that chair from sitting like it should.”
Become the aspect of revelation, Mrs. Wolf said.
“You keep him off his balance, Lulu. Out-think him.”
And then Daddy sat in the same chair, with his back to me, rude as anything. As I stood there wondering what to do, that twist in my stomach warned me of his intent to move. The anxiety crawling across my shoulders told me the same thing.
He rocked the chair back onto his rear legs, and before I could think I clutched at the posts and righted the chair, but I went too far. My father’s feet hit the floor in front of him with a slap, the back legs of the chair lifting before he rocked the whole thing backward again, setting the chair squarely on its four legs.
He hopped out of the seat gleeful as a boy and turned to reach for me. I stepped back, searching his face for some clue as to what I’d done to make him so happy.
“Lulu, you lifted me straight off the ground.” He didn’t seem to know if he wanted to embrace me or clap me on the shoulder.
“Sir?”
All he’d done was tilt a chair far enough backward to take a spill. Instinct had taken me, and I’d kept him from cracking his head. I shut my eyes against the image of what could have happened then, and what had already occurred.
“Never mind how I know this,” Daddy said, catching sight of my relief. “I know it is all.”
He’d already opened an old wound when he told me about the fellow he’d admired as boy. That wound had closed again and closed for good. Whatever blood he’d spilled in telling me about his past was a mistake, and he wouldn’t open that scar for me again. I didn’t want him to. That dark hole was filled with questions and answers, but if I tore it open, I’d know my father as the boy he was, and as the man the world saw. I would know him as more than a father. I couldn’t stomach the intimacy.
“Lulu, don’t hide from this,” Daddy said. He hugged me, pressing my face into his shirt. Bristles of hair stung my cheek.
“Open your eyes and see that you have a gift,” he said. His voice held all the confidence in the world.
“How do you get lifting out of falling backward?” I asked when he released me. One eye opened, then the other.
“Science,” he said. “And guiding the way a person observes what’s truly taking place around him.”
Daddy tipped the empty chair backward. I envisioned a seated fellow lazing on a porch, his feet propped on a railing as he watched the day amble by. Until Daddy shoved the chair forward onto its two front legs. Any fellow in that seat would have split his lip on the rail where his feet had been. Before my invisible spectator could recover, Daddy rocked the chair back and set it down innocently on four legs.
“I weigh well over two hundred pounds,” Daddy said. “With me in chair, it didn’t fly so far forward. This is a story of balance, Lulu, of fulcrum and lever, and how for the moment when you’ve got a fellow in a chair in the place between leaning back and tipping forward, he believes he’s lifted, an inch or two or maybe more. And you, Missy, you believe it, too.”
We practiced a day or two or maybe more. When my arms were straight out and rigid and my father was seated ahead of me in the chair, I couldn’t lean the chair backward far enough. When my knees locked, I couldn’t tilt the thing forward at all, and the trying strained my stomach muscles and slid my feet out from under me on the rug.
Daddy’s pocket watch ticked loudly from his vest. He needed to wash. I made myself listen not to my thoughts, but welcome instead the soft cushion of quiet around my breathing. My heartbeat grew louder, and the room around me slithered away through a pinhole.
Something circulates in the background, Mrs. Wolf wrote.
I pulled, and the chair groaned, and then it rose, back and up and easy, the front legs hovering an inch or two above the floor, the back legs balanced on their edges. I held my father there, suspended, in the moment of finding the apex between far back and far front. In that single place, there was a real and true lift, at the top of the triangle of man and kitchen chair, rocked back, then forward, by me.
Daddy’s shout broke open my padded world. Blinking and dizzy, I massaged my raw hands. His grip on my shoulder was hot, and I heard his laugh, but he might as well have been on the other side of a glass. Momma ran in, confused, but Daddy spoke words that stretched and bobbed and made no sense. Momma applauded me, her smile beautiful. And gradually, with his hands on my arms and hers around me, they came through the glass, and my feet were on the ground and my parents were so very happy.
“Newton, Lulu,” he said. “Fulcrum and lever in action.”
My heartbeat roared over his voice.
He wanted to work this test until I got it smooth. I was too flustered, he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said, waiting for my pulse to return to normal.
SUCCESS AT HOME WAS the first step. When I was ready, people would come to the parlor to watch. After that, he said, I’d play the Magnetic Girl in a theater a few times. Enough to lift the loan from his shoulders, as I’d promised.
“Consider that fox you say you held in your thrall,” Daddy said. “Who needs a dumb animal when you can hold a roomful of strangers the same way?”
The lines he drew in his notebook became tight wires with every test, every time.
“Think of how proud Leo will be,” Daddy said.
The straight lines in his notebook were my gift to my father. For myself, I only wanted to captivate and practice the power Mrs. Wolf applied to her visitors: the Mesmerist’s kindness toward the unwell.
