“A cure?” asked Maria.
“More hours?” asked Betsy.
The Earthshine Factory didn’t have 20,000 workers, but it had five hundred Earthshine Girls. She knew the ways they struggled to make ends meet, and the demands that met them when they arrived home. Some of them packed only buttered bread for their lunches. Some of their shoulders were marked with milk stains from their babies, burped. “Better conditions. Higher wages. Job security.”
“A strike?” asked Maria.
“Like those textile workers in New York? My cousin was there! She was one of them!” said Gilly.
“My daddy was a miner,” said another girl.
“A strike?” asked Pearl and Victoria, both at once.
“A strike?” asked Amanda Mahooney. “We can’t—”
“A strike!” Opal said, now standing, her index finger aloft like a preacher at the high point of his sermon. Her body vibrated. The voice receded. The veil lifted. She stood now with the women.
FOUR DAYS LATER, AT WHATshould have been the start of their shift, the Earthshine Girls stood on the steps to the factory, blocking the entrance. Maria held a megaphone. Betsy’s back was pressed against the main door, her wrist chained to the lock. From across the way, a commotion. Pearl led the others in a single-file march to mark the strike line. By noon, already a small crowd had gathered to watch. The machinists found the whole event amusing at first. Newspapermen took notes. A group of young boys tossed stones in their direction.
The Earthshine Girls wore picket sashes over their uniforms that they’d hastily made from felt and flour sacks. Gilly had brought an American flag. Pearl and the other girls carried signs.OUR BODIES, OUR SOAP, one read. Opal traced the picket line, back and forth. She scanned the crowd for Jagr. When a newspaperman held a camera in their direction, she shielded her face with her sign. Chanting with the women left her breathless. The baby slowed her gait.
The papers would first describe the strike as a small gathering of upset women. They would explain how the comet made them act in atypical ways. It’d been widely reported that even domesticated dogs were behaving unusually, much as they do before an earthquake. The papers described the comet as a nucleus and enveloping body, with a tail of varying configurations in the shapes of swords and scimitars. But what was in that nucleus still remained a mystery to scientists and astronomers, some of whom believed that the comet contained thevery matter that created our solar system billions of years ago, primitive compounds. Primordial elements. Stardust. The very stuff and essence of life. The very thing Opal held inside her at this moment, the very thing Madame de Fleur had given back to her.
Later, at home, Opal reread Madame de Fleur’s most recent letter.
Dearest Opal,
I could see the moon in the sky today, all day that sliver of white against the blue, and I wondered if you could see it, too. I love when the moon makes itself known in the daytime, this orb we associate with night. It has nothing to do with darkness, except that’s when we tend to look for it. The world wants what is easy. You may want that, too. You want me to list for you the possibilities. The comet is two months away. The world could end. Or it may not. Your husband may find you, or he may not. All outcomes will be hard on us.
I was delighted with all your good news: the Comet Pills, the contract. When I read that you felt the baby move, I placed my hand to my own stomach and imagined it was you. I believe this baby has come for a reason. The Spirit Machine can tell us more. You seem to believe I hold the answers, but I cannot promise you the future. I do not know it. Like you, I can only convey what I feel: I worry you will not make it here, but that does not mean I do not want you to come.
—M
Opal didn’t know how to explain the effect of her letters except to say the words patched a hole in her heart, but also bore a hole in it. She found herself wondering what the woman looked like tired or sleeping, or upon waking when one is most tender, most herself. She wanted to cook her a rump roast and watch her eat it—though she couldn’t say why that idea thrilled her so. She had never cooked for Oren. She wanted to look for the moon in the daytime and point; she wanted the woman’s eyes to follow her arm up to her fingertip up to the sky. She wanted the thrill of the woman’s voice, saying,Yes! Yes! I see it, too.
How long until Jagr tracked her down? Days? Weeks?
Opal clutched the paper to her chest now. She tried to imagine it: The Spirit Machine would give her the answers and then—
Herbébéwould wade in the Seine, not the murky Ohio. Her girl would walk down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, that street named for the Greek afterlife that promised eternal bliss. In France, they’d eat pain au chocolat for breakfast every morning, if she liked. She’d wear lip rouge in bright red, like she’d seen in the magazines. She’d open her own apothecary. She’d hang a sign:COMET PILLS AND OTHER CURES. Recently she’d bought a book of French sayings.Vouloir c’est pouvoir.
To want is to be able to.
1986
Don’t let them whisper behind your back!
—LIFEBUOY HEALTH SOAP
If only I could bottle the zeitgeist of 1986. We believed we could be anyone. We could do anything. A child could find Halley’s Comet in the sky by fashioning a wire coat hanger into a star frame. One could build a homemade STEBLICOM box from power magnifiers and two seven-watt night-lights, and this contraption could give amateur comet-watchers access well beyond that of even the most advanced scientists of 1910. NASA planned to send theChallengershuttle to space to take pictures of the comet, and an ordinary schoolteacher was among the crew. That’s how much more advanced we were: We could photograph the comet. We could blast high school teachers into space.
I’d called my agent, and she was able to track down numbers for Edith and Janie, the other Earthshine Girls. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said, and I promised her I wouldn’t.
Edith and Janie agreed to meet me at Eden Park, in the gazebo usually reserved for prom photos and horny teens. Edith arrived right ontime, carrying a cardboard take-out tray with three coffees. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She walked toward me, heel to toe, the way I’d been trained to do.
When I was seventeen and Edith eight or nine, she visited the Earthshine studio. She had watched the shoot from the recording box. I saw her and asked the wardrobe assistant who she was. “She’s nobody.”
“Is she an actress?” I asked.
