Later, in the darkness, Opal’s husband lay heaped on their bed making noises like an injured whippoorwill. She stood before the bed and watched his labored breathing. He neither blinked his eyes, nor focused them. She’d washed his hat, and now she placed it upturned on his chest where, when he opened his eyes, he would see it was spotless.
She recalled that train ride out of Gallipolis, how the empty seat beside her rattled, how when the conductor came around to collect tickets, he looked at the seat and said,Traveling alone? Yes, she’d said.Alone, but she was not alone. Her breasts ached. Her stomach cramped and bloated. She watched trees tick by outside her window.
Now, by the riverwalk, the photograph of herself its own kind of haunting, she was alarmed by the idea that Jagr lurked among the crowd. He didn’t know about the baby. She’d be punished for leaving him. She’d be forced to—
She looked behind her, to the facades of buildings that stood facing the river, to the rickshaw ticket booth where one could purchase fares. She scanned the carriages lined up to take arriving passengers to their destinations and the stacks of pallets that were being unloaded from the steamers. A man with Jagr’s hands held a piece of timber. A messenger boy on his bike stooped with Jagr’s shoulders. A bag boy whistled, and it sounded like Jagr’s. There was the vendor selling grilled meats. The fire rose up again from his barrel. Yes, Opal saw it: eyes and a face and body, tilted forward, Jagr himself.
WANTED, RUNAWAY WIFE. REWARD $100.
Opal folded the paper and stuffed it in her pocketbook.
At home, she leaned over the basin of the sink and splashed her face with water. When she righted herself, she felt it.Finallyshe felt it. A swift kick in her stomach—a flutter really—then, again, two more quick movements. How to explain this moment? How brief but profound it seemed. The baby had spoken, finally—just to her, in a language only she could understand, a secret only she knew, an otherworldly whisper. Could the baby hear her, too? Soon, the life inside her would cross over tothisside, tothislife. She was the threshold between the two worlds, the very space where the crossing occurred.
Opal reached up to her highest cabinet, where she kept her own medicines. When her hand touched the vial, the baby moved again. Now, she filled her glass from the faucet. She balanced the pill on her tongue. She’d leave the day the money came in. The very moment the cash touched her hands. She let the pill roll to the back of her tongue, then she lifted her glass.
Opal dressed for bed. The lights spangled. Her mind relaxed.Darkness washed in waves around her. She drew a hot bath. She scrubbed her skin with the Earthshine Soap she’d taken from work. She rested her neck on the lip of the tub and listened to the coal barges moving up and down the river, their thin, low horns moaning on behalf of the world.
January 21, 1986
Interview with Jane Doe No. 12
ByThe Cincinnati Inquisitor
CI:Describe your experience with Earthshine Soap.
JANE DOE NO. 12:The weekends smelled like lavender. Saturdays, I scrubbed the kitchen and bathrooms with Earthshine while my husband watched baseball on TV with the baby and my other kids played in the basement. I could only clean on weekends because the rest of the week I worked a regular nine-to-five, and when I got home it was time to get supper on the table or help the kids with homework. I never had time to myself. I’d lock myself in the bathroom and cry, and if someone knocked I’d say I was disinfecting the linoleum, which I was. That was true.
My insides hurt, but all my doctors told me nothing was wrong. Pain in my stomach, in my pelvis, in my back. Sometimes I couldn’t breathe from the pain, and I couldn’t cook or eat or take the children to the park. My periods never returned after nursing my third child. I’d wake lethargic in the morning and count on my fingers the hours till bedtime. The doctors said it was all in my head.
CI:What happened?
JANE DOE NO. 12:We hired someone to help around the house. She had this gentle, wide smile, but I could sense it in her, this loneliness, too. One day, she was rehanging the living room curtains, and I asked her—Do you ever feel just, like, there’s something wrong with you, but you don’t even know how to describe it? And you wouldn’t know what to do about it, even if you could?
L--- said yes. She told me she suspected the soap. She told me she’d once stopped using it for a while, and she felt better, but the people she worked for complained that the sinks weren’t white enough, the floors weren’t shiny, so she switched back. She didn’t want to live like this.Nothing felt real. She started to cry, and I did, too, and we just held each other right there in that living room, the curtains still down, right there for the neighbors to see. I didn’t care. It felt so good to hold her. To be held. That is when I knew my whole life had been a lie.
CI:And you believe Earthshine Soap is responsible?
JANE DOE NO. 12:I know it is.
1986
Out of the shadows and into the light of new loveliness!
—CAMAY SOAP
It was early still, and dark. I turned my radio off and sat in the quiet of the studio parking lot waiting for call time. I studied the factory, lit up even at night, the smokestack that readBREMEN, Bertie’s maiden name. At the Earthshine Grand Re-Opening Ceremony I had stood next to Bertie in that dress she bought me. My mother watched from the crowd. She was thin and square-shouldered in that same beige coat she wore for every occasion.
When I was younger, I’d read in my science textbook about spontaneous combustion. A man was dining with a woman at an Italian restaurant, and midbite he simply combusted. “Talk About a Hot Date,” read the title of that section, and I remember how terrified I’d been, how my mother set a fire extinguisher next to my bed, just so I could get some sleep. Only now do I consider that fire extinguishercould have been more for her than for me, a way of saving herself if I burst into flames.
Does your husband know?
What would my mother think of me now?
Someone knocked on my window, and I jumped. “Get away,” I yelled. “I have Mace.” I had taken a self-defense class at the local YWCA. I’d learned to use my voice, to “yell and tell,” my instructor explained, to make myself out as a difficult target.
“It’s just me, Nona. Jesus.”
The glass squeaked as I rolled the window down. The car was old, but Wyatt claimed the engine would run forever.
