It’s strange to look at someone who so resembles you. It makes you feel an odd sense of proprietary longing, of protection, of nostalgia, too. It makes you think about yourself—of the past and your own childhood, of your mother and the shape of her hands and how they held you once as a baby. It makes you think of the whole of it, the cycle of life. The casting director was good. The girl looked just like me. The Earthshine Girl could have been my child.
But she wasn’t.
There’s power in creation, isn’t there? If I could create a baby, I could do anything. But I couldn’t do anything. I could do nothing. A sense of unfairness hit me—cosmic unfairness, you might call it—that a casting director could keep spawning Earthshine Girls in my image, when I could not spawn any living thing myself.
I thought of how in the hospital, the nurse asked if I wanted to hold the baby, but I shook my head. Wyatt looked away; he wouldn’t meet my eyes, and that cut me in half. I could see his face in profile, a mix of pity and disdain. In the years since then, I’ve questioned that moment, my decision. It’d been the only chance to see my true likeness, and I’d refused.
We never spoke of it again. Back then, one didn’t talk about that sort of thing, and isn’t that the whole problem? That we’re asked to keep quiet on the subject? That we do?
It’s so hard to look back on memories without polluting them with hindsight. I turned off the TV. A pair of Wyatt’s jeans were slung across the chair in my bedroom. I reached for them, letting the legs unfurl, and I pressed the fabric to me. I remembered a story I’d once heard about a ceramicist who was overcome with grief from the unexpected loss of her husband. After she buried him, she sat among his things, and that’s when she noticed the days-old indentation in his bean bag chair from where his body once rested. She made an impression of it and cast the impression in metallic clay. Then she set about making an entire installment wherein her husband’s shape was carvedout of everyday objects: a bed, a couch, an office chair. The woman would fold herself into the hollow that was once her husband, claiming that those were the moments she felt closest to him.
Sitting in our bedroom, I felt grief akin to what that ceramicist must have felt, a longing to be held again. I’m not sure it was even about Wyatt, but I ached for him, his physical presence, the familiarity of his body. The freckles on his shoulders. The divots above his hips. The long muscles of his calves. The way his stubble scratched my cheeks in the morning, and he called it natural exfoliation. We are all bodies. We crave other bodies because it roots us to our own experience and reminds us we exist. I wanted to be touched—isn’t it ridiculous to admit that? That in this moment when I felt grief, all I could think about was desire? That’s the thing with grief—it takes no material form, so we project it onto any object we can find.
Soon, I went searching for an object. I foraged beneath the kitchen sink for the Earthshine canister. The holes on the top resembled the ones in the telephone receiver, only larger. I turned the Earthshine in my hands, spun the familiar label with an illustration of my young face. I must have looked at that picture at least a million times in my life. The familiar becomes invisible. That’s how we can hurt the people closest to us. We stop seeing them in detail.EARTHSHINE SOAPwas written in bold block letters, underscored by a fading line. I studied it closer. Then I saw it, on the package, clearer than anything I’d ever witnessed in my life: the streak beneath those words, brighter at one end and broadening at the other, not just a design but the tail of a comet.
I remembered when I was still the Earthshine Girl and Halley led me on that tour of the factory, past the burping machines and conveyor belts and workers, to a dusty old storage area where they kept memorabilia: old soap-stirring paddles and white uniform dresses and vintage posters and wooden crates packed with cakes of soap that crumbled if you picked them up.
“Treasures,” Halley said, because she loved old things. At the back of the room, against the wall, leaned weatherworn pieces of the old signthat used to be nestled in the hills of Mount Adams, near downtown. I used to be able to read it from the road below—EARTHSHINE—as though announcing the name of the city itself. It reminded me of theHOLLYWOODsign in Los Angeles that I’d first seen when Bertie Tuttle took me there to watch her star dedicated on the Walk of Fame. I stood next to her in costume. It’d been my first time away from home.
Halley stretched her hands above her head, trying to gauge the height of each wooden letter. Up close, the paint was rough like alligator skin. I touched it, and she told me not to because of lead. “I want thatH,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be fun? Hang it on my wall?”
“Do you live in a mansion?” I asked.
“Bertie does.”
“I’ll take theN,” I said. The letters were at least twenty feet tall, and one would never fit through the door of the small house where I lived. “What does it even mean,Earthshine?” I asked.
It was an astrological term for when sunlight reflects off the Earth’s surface and illuminates the dark underside of the moon. Poets call it the new moon in the old moon’s arms, or moonglow, or the ashen moon, or the Da Vinci glow after Leonardo, who first explained the phenomenon. But poets aim for emotion, not accuracy. To them, something is always like something, defined by what it isn’t, so it’s hard to grasp what they really mean, even if they claim to simplify complexities. Halley was a poet in her own way, I guess. “When the sun talks to the moon through the Earth,” Halley said, “you know, like Sal? That’s earthshine.”
“Why name a soap for that?” I asked.
Halley thought for a moment, then she erected her posture, put a fist to her chest, and affected the voice of a radio announcer: “Earthshine Soap. So effective you’ll see parts of yourself you didn’t know existed.”
Staring at that canister, I could see myself clearly now.
I must have stood up at some point. I must have thought about the Jane Does and Halley and that notebook. Perhaps I unbound the twineand flipped through the pages, then stopped to study the handwriting on that final page. TheCin Comet Pills had little curlicues, and Opal Doucet had drawn a square around the words, boxing them in. I must have collected the canisters of Earthshine Soap from my house. One in the bathroom. One in the linen closet. One atop the dryer in the basement.
You don’t recall a memory—a memory recalls you. This is what I remember now, all these years later: standing in the garage in Wyatt’s jeans, the Earthshine creating a plume of dust when I threw it in the trash. I was bleeding still, heavily. I could feel it between my legs.
1910
The photograph of Reginald Goodman resembled a turtle: large body, small head. His hair was parted in the middle and waxed, and he wore round spectacles at the tip of his nose. Goodman owned Goodman’s Beard Wax out of Pittsburgh, and now, according to the papers, he was buying Earthshine Soaps.
The news came as no surprise—they’d all heard the rumors.
“Do you think we’ll be out of work?” asked Maria.
“Maybe they’ll spare us. We’re cheap labor. The machine workers get paid twice as much for the same hours. And all because they have a little wee between their legs,” Betsy said.
“To think that one’s wages are determined by your privates,” Maria said.
At that moment, the foreman descended the stairs from his platform. He rarely came down to the floor unless there was a mechanical issue or an injured girl. He stopped in front of Opal’s station. “Follow me,” he said.
It’d been a week since she’d plucked Jagr’s poster from that board. How quickly he had tracked her down. Why is one always surprised by endings when that’s what we’re marching toward all along?
She considered her options. She could run, but she wouldn’t get far. The foreman would call for the help of the machinists, who wouldquickly overpower her. She could pretend to pass out or call “Fire!” or fight with her fists, but what good would that do her? To call a woman the weaker of the beasts was simply an observation of muscle mass.
Opal followed the foreman up the metal stairs and past his platform. From this vantage point, the floor of the factory looked different, smaller and more massive at once. She could see all the girls toiling below. Up this high, she could see right out the window to the cityscape, to Union Terminal in the distance, the train station that resembled a giant table clock.
