“And you are the operator?”
“I am the telephone box.”
Opal allowed her body to relax, to simply be. Now, across from Maria, she hummed and felt the vibrations spread from her lips, down her body and out through her limbs. She blanked her mind. She thought of Madame de Fleur, the arch of her neck, the lines of her jaw—I am myself, embodied by a self. Two people at once, two consciousnesses, two sets of desires, but only one body through which to experience it.When Madame de Fleur sat in séance, she spoke in a deeper register than her natural voice. Her lips formed a shape that, if traced by her finger, would be a perfect O. In that moment, Opal felt something—a tug at her mind, like a piece of thread that snagged on a knot. The room warmed and cooled in equal measure. “Someone’s come through,” Opal said. She pitched her voice deeper now; she made a circle of her lips.
Maria gasped. How simple it all was, really. Opal imagined a body climbing into her own, limb by limb, like her skin was a suit someone else could pull on. She contained. She was contained.
She listened for a voice, but all she could hear was a distant sound, a radio out of tune—static and a noise drowned out behind it.
Opal asked for a description of Maria’s ailments. Maria again explained how she felt exhausted and she couldn’t breathe and sometimes she felt like the walls of the factory, or her house, were closing in on her—and not just in her mind. When this happened, a kind of terror overcame her, like she needed to escape or like she was going to die, even if she knew she wouldn’t. And what was worse? The dying or the feeling like she might? As she explained this, she looked like shemight cry, but instead she smiled. “The problem is, nobody believes me, but look.” She pulled back to reveal that her hands were shaking.
How many times had Opal tried to explain to Jagr what she felt, but he would never listen to her, instead wanting to characterize the experiences of her own body.You’re overtired, he might say, for instance, if ever she dared to cry. Feelings were a symptom, not a disease.Feelings, he’d said,cannot make you sick.
“Do you know what’s wrong with me? Can you fix it?” Maria’s eyes were wet with anticipation and worry. “I have children. They have no one else. I can’t be this way. I don’t want to be.”
Opal bit the inside of her cheek until she could taste blood. She had never been comfortable asking for what she needed. But now she had this baby, and she needed to get to France before she was born. Opal used that deeper voice as a mediator: “Fifty cents for a cure.”
Maria nodded. Opal thought of how long she must stand on the floor to make a single dollar, how many crates of soap she’d need to fill. The women each had something the other wanted, and each was willing to make the trade.
That night, at home in the rooms she rented from a man who spoke mostly German, Opal removed Jagr’s formulary from the cabinet where she kept it. She pressed it at its crease. How different the notebook looked here, in this city, in this light, his formulas written in his cramped, neat style. Jagr believed in precision and science, and so entire pages had been erased and rewritten with a meticulous hand.
There, in her small kitchen, by the light of two candles, she studied Jagr’s formulary like her mother had once studied the Bible. Each formula was numbered and beneath the number he’d listed its uses. Insomnia. Fatigue. Heart disease. Nervousness. Sadness. Menstrual problems. Gout. Hysteria. Pain. The pages were annotated, describing his processes, his experiments, his mistakes. Formulas had been worked and reworked, each calculation neatly transcribed by his hand. He’d marked beneath each formula with his initials, so small it could have been a drip of ink.
She turned to the formula foremotional disorders. Hysteria, Jagr once said, is a social disease. He’d once treated an entire family of sisters—eight in total—who all suffered convulsions, but he could find nothing medically wrong with them. Jagr believed the mere suggestion of illness was enough to bring on symptoms in another. And symptoms are not always evidence of disease. Jagr had prescribed each convulsing sister two capsules a day. Soon after, their symptoms disappeared.
But what did Jagr know of emotional symptoms?
Opal began with Jagr’s formula but then added to it the ingredients she’d known to work in such cases, ingredients she herself took for pain or unusual episodes, though minus the narcotics. She made a list: milk of licorice and common nettle. Motherwort and skullcap. Black cohosh and valerian root. Lavender and lemon balm. In the morning, she visited the medical botanist on Court Street. She scoured the fields just outside the city for familiar shrubs. And later, in her small kitchen, she filled pots and set them to boil. When she was done, she turned to a blank page in the formulary and recorded the ingredients, the measurements, her process.
A few days later, at her station on the floor of the Earthshine Factory, she interrupted her working rhythm—fold, flip, tuck—to pass the pills to Maria. She’d stored them in a scrubbed sardine tin. Maria pocketed them in her apron, then dropped a handful of coins into Opal’s lunch pail.
“What do you call them?” Maria asked, opening the tin. She sniffed tentatively.
Opal hadn’t considered naming the medicine until this very moment. Jagr had only ever used numbers to designate his cures. Now, she thought of Swirling Spray and Mourning Spray. She thought of the comet—Halley’s Comet—named after the man who, knowing he’d not live to see it, first theorized this celestial object would return again, then again. She thought of Madame de Fleur’s most recent letter:I think the comet will save us, not destroy us, in the end.It was thein the endthat now seemed hopeful to Opal, the unspokenin thebeginningbehind it, the idea that something must be destroyed to be saved.
WOMEN HAVE A MODE OFdistributing private information without newspapers or switchboards or telegrams. Mouth to ear, the old way. The girls at the Earthshine factory began whispering about Opal as they walked by her station to distribute empty crates or replenish her stacks of overwrap.
“What do they call you?” one girl had asked. Her name was Amanda Mahooney. She was young with plump skin, unmarred by age, and she sat a few rows back.
“They?”
“The other girls. When you sit with them. You know, your spiritualist name, like a stage name or something. Something with a little mystique.” She didn’t seem to be skeptical of Opal, but she was certainly no believer.
Of course she thought ofMin this moment, of Madame de Fleur. She’d wondered if theMstood for Madame—or if it was her first initial. Mary, Martha, Maggie, Mabel. None of these seemed to fit.
“Madame Doucet,” Opal said to Amanda. She pronounced it like Maria had—Do-Say. It sounded French.
Madame Doucet.
She sat with Betsy, next, in the lunchroom. As they conversed, Betsy flattened her bangs against her forehead. The burn on her arm had left a white scar that resembled a bicycle, two large circles connected by a bridge. She was pregnant after less than a year of marriage. Her stomach pushed against the fabric of her uniform dress like a small round of bread concealed in a sack. She twisted the bottom of her apron as she described how at night she cried, sobbed so hard it was like she was expelling something from her body. The sobbing and the darkness provided some sort of relief. On occasion her husband would wake and ask her what was wrong, and Betsy would tell himshe was just so happy, so excited to become a mother, but it’d all been a lie.I’ve been pregnant once before, she whispered.A soldier.
Victoria felt on edge, nervous all the time. Ruth’s anger manifested as an appetite, and she’d gained ten pounds the past six months alone, stuffing herself with any sugary treat she could find. Gilly sometimes experienced lethargy so deep, so penetrating she couldn’t make it to work, and the foreman had given her a final warning. She said she’d lie there in her bed, her limbs heavy as tree branches, and a tree can’t very well go to work. Pearl described herself as alternating between crushing anxiety and intense joy. Up and down and up and down. Some days she wanted to crawl out of her skin from terror. Other days she felt she might explode from the beauty of the world. She was exhausted by it. “I have nobody to talk to about this. Nobody to tell me if it’s normal or not.”
“And when did your symptoms start?” Opal asked. It was that deeper voice that asked it.
“Last year. Not long after I started working here.”
“Have you reported it to the foreman?” Opal asked.
