The bell on the front door dinged. The front register worker yelled out, “Welcome to Dowd’s!” A stocky man in a suit stepped inside. He wore dark glasses he didn’t remove. His hair was buzzed on the sides, and the front came to a point, which could have either been menacing or a sign that, like most men, he didn’t know how to use hair gel.
To act well, one must have instincts. Acting comes not from our mouths but our guts. That’s what so many aspiring actors get wrong.I felt this man’s presence in the core of me. I knew in an instant what the man was looking for: not aspirin or hair gel, of that I was certain.
“Thanks,” I said to Gary, then quickly cut past the old woman and down the first aid aisle, past gauze and bandages and ointments meant for burns. But the man headed down a different aisle, cut over, and caught up to me. He blocked the door. Then, he handed me an envelope.
“You’ve been served,” he said, then he pushed open the door and disappeared.
I opened the envelope right there, inside the pharmacy. A form letter with a fill-in-the-blank answer set. On a blank line someone had written my name: Nona Dixon, and on another blank line someone had written my description: Original Earthshine Girl.
A deposition summons for the Earthshine lawsuit. I’d been called as a witness.
1910
Opal viewed her life across some great misty field, always walking toward it but never quite reaching the other side. Just when she’d managed to save some money, her bills were due. Five and a half dollars a week didn’t go very far in the city, even with the money she brought in from her cures. Sure, she could stretch a dollar. The bakery sold day-old bread for a penny. She found complimentary coffee in the lobby of the grand Hotel Sinton, where the monied people stayed. Nobody seemed to mind when she took the elevator to the residential floors and borrowed toiletries from the cart of the cleaning staff. Her work dress gave her a kind of invisibility in such spaces. Most assumed she was the help.
She measured her time by the letters to and from Madame de Fleur. She read and reread each one like her mother used to read the Bible at night by the hearth, searching, looking for answers. Madame de Fleur wrote poetically about ideas and the universe. The woman’s private life was exotic, unknown, while her own felt trivial and small. All Opal could think to write about was her literal life, how she felt with the baby inside her. Tired. Big. Embodied. She told Madame de Fleur of the Earthshine Girls and their illnesses and how she sat with them in séance in the lunchroom and how she prescribed them Comet Pills, which improved their spirits.When I sit with those workers,I can see you, in my mind, on that platform, in that tent. I can sense your presence. But you say you’re not the sun. If we are scale models of the universe, what is the center? How can we know it? Right now, it feels as though this baby is the whole of me, as though someone might point to my middle and say: that’s Opal right there. But I existed before her, didn’t I? I’ll exist after, too. I used to believe in science, but science cannot explain that night or why this baby has come to be, even if I understand how. You’d tell me some mysteries must remain so, that certainty robs the world of possibility. But I want to know: What are the possibilities? Can the Spirit Machine tell me that? Can you?
She stared at the words on the page, which seemed to arise from her hand, independent of her mind, like the automatic writing Madame de Fleur had told her about. She felt flushed after writing. Naked. Exposed. Relieved.
At the factory, Opal packaged the soap. Her ankles swelled from standing. Her ears rang from all the noise. At least once a shift, an Earthshine Girl passed her a note. She was sad or tired or angry or alone. She couldn’t sleep or couldn’t eat or couldn’t think, her head in a permanent fog. And during lunch, in the cramped lunchroom, Opal held her hands and felt her pulse and watched her breathing and listened to her describe her symptoms she’d be too embarrassed to describe anywhere else.
One evening, as she was leaving work, a young woman approached her on the sidewalk. “Madame Doucet?” she asked. Opal no longer startled at the sound of her name. At the factory, it’d become something of a refrain from the other girls seeking cures.Madame Doucet, Madame Doucet, Madame Doucet, like a frantic melody.
The girl was wearing a too-big overcoat, which gave her the appearance of a child, though she was probably at least sixteen. Opal didn’t recognize the girl, not from the factory, not from anywhere else. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, and she didn’t dress like a domestic. “Who’s asking?” Opal asked. Still, she must be careful.
“Me. I’m asking,” she said. The girl pushed up her sleeves and whispered: “I need a cure.”
Opal stopped walking. “Who sent you?”
The girl looked confused. “Everyone knows about you and your Comet Pills, Madame Doucet.”
In the evenings, she wrote to Madame de Fleur. She told her about the girl. She explained how strangers now waited for her outside the factory. They’d heard about Comet Pills from their sisters or mothers or cousins or daughters. At night, after her shifts, she labored in her kitchen, boiling and grinding and filling the capsules, her windows wide open to ease the smell. To work she’d begun carrying extra tins, stuffed inside her apron so the metal rattled each time she bent down to set another crate to the floor to be counted. She was saving more than she was spending now—she hoped to leave for France by May Day, well before the baby’s arrival.
Opal sent letters to the woman more frequently than she could possibly expect replies.I’m afraid they’ll learn how ordinary I am, how just two months ago I scraped my husband’s work boots and scrubbed his drawers and made soap from wood ash and cooking grease because he didn’t believe in buying manufactured goods. I’m a woman who once boiled eggs and pickled beets, and maybe I still am, but I don’t feel ordinary feelings. I don’t think ordinary thoughts.She dropped the envelopes in the morning post. Lately it seemed like the events of her life only truly happened once she had sent the letter off, that it was the writing that made it real, that Opal existed only to tell her story to someone else.
Had it been only seven months ago since she’d met Madame de Fleur? Back in Gallipolis, Opal had watched the assemblage of strangers descend upon the fairgrounds, their wagons loaded and covered, long poles sticking from beneath the cloth. It took a full day for the tents to be erected, the white fabric billowing in the wind like a thing come alive.
The circus.
She’d wanted to go, but Jagr forbade her, said it wouldn’t be good for her condition, but then Jagr had been called away for the month to Wheeling for business. Normally she obeyed her husband’s wishes; she’dbeen trained to please him. Yet she felt pulled toward the fairgrounds, toward the music and cannon booms she could hear those first few nights when she stood in her yard, emptying the washtub. With her husband gone, Opal made her way to the giant circus tent, the white canvas like slack skin.
Inside, a woman dangled from a piece of silk, another stood atop a horse. She saw a fire-eater, a sword swallower, and an armless man, lying on the ground and juggling balls with the soles of his feet. As a girl, she’d readAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and she marveled at how falling into a dark hole led to someplace spacious and colorful and strange. Now here she was, Alice herself.
And then, as though she’d been destined to arrive there all her life, Opal stood before the threshold to another tent. She smelled burning sage. A thin thread of smoke plumed through the doorway like a curled finger beckoning her. She read the sign:MADAME DE FLEUR: SÉANCES AND SPIRIT HAPPENINGS.
Opal pulled back the heavy curtain and stepped inside. The woman on the stage sat quietly in a chair. She wore a dark flowing frock and a white medallion that shone like the moon. The room was awash in red from the pendant lights. She looked at Opal with startled eyes, as though their eyeballs were magnetized, as though she was seeing something in Opal that Opal couldn’t see herself.
“You have awoken the spirits,” Madame de Fleur said.
The tent was cramped with spectators who now all turned toward Opal. For a brief moment, she worried she might be recognized by someone who’d report the sighting to Jagr. But, then, wouldn’t they have to admit to attending a séance, too?
Madame de Fleur’s hands were bound with rope. Still, a steady knocking came from somewhere in the room, and nobody could locate the source. The sound, like the clopping of hooves, originated from above and below at once, from the woman herself. A man in the front clasped his hands, begging to contact his son who’d succumbed to scarlet fever.
“Step forward,” she instructed him. Her voice was low and even and velvety and soft, like a warm blanket thrown over the world. It held an accent so imperceptible Opal may have imagined it. “He stands in front of you. There.” She lifted her bound wrists to point. “Young boy. Delicate features. White hair. Reach out.”
“I don’t see him,” the man said. “Walter? Are you there? Tell me you’re here. Give me a sign.”
At that moment, all the lights extinguished at once, and a few people screamed, and the audience sat in total darkness until they heard the strike of a match from the stage manager and Madame de Fleur again became illuminated, her hands now unbound.
