I bristled. Janie stared at me, unapologetically. Now, I can see she was defending herself—her right to give up her career for her kids. Her life, she was saying, was important, too. But in the moment, I’ll admit, I wanted to slug her face.
“Gene Longworth would murder you for talking at that deposition,” Janie said.
“I know,” I said.
Edith began to whisper something, but right then a man walked into the gazebo. He was dressed in a baja, like he’d just walked off some California beach. “Hey, Earthshine Girls,” he said. He pulled a camera from beneath his baja, and the flash made a sound like a bug zapper. In the photo, Janie hoists her ChapStick midair; Edith leans forward like she’s blowing out candles. And me? My eyes are wide with surprise, with the words Edith had whispered to me:Madame Doucet. They called her a witch. She could talk to the dead and divine cures from the Other Side. But she killed people with her cures, they said.
BY MORNING, OUR PICTURE WASin theTempo of the Times, and Mr. Longworth left three messages on my machine.We need to talk, he said.Now. Call me.His voice held the patronizing tone of an angry father considering consequences.
I poured my coffee, then picked up my kitchen phone and dialed Edith. I wrapped and rewrapped the phone cord around my finger.She killed people with her cures, she’d whispered, coming in so close that her lip brushed my ear.They called her a witch.I thought of Samantha fromBewitched, the Wicked Witch of the West,The Witches of Eastwick. Some good. Some bad. And nowMadameDoucet. What kind was she?
In drama, a single detail can reveal the whole of a person—sharp particularity, one of my conservatory professors called it—and I thought of Opal’s signature in that old notebook, the dramatic loops, thetcrossed in anger. What had led her to that rage?
You don’t know Bertie Tuttle, Halley said the last night I saw her.
I didn’t know Opal Doucet either.
But I knew Halley. She’d left me that notebook—a message from beyond—because she wanted me to see the name Opal Doucet. She wanted me to know her, this witch. She had marked the page with our photograph. I sensed that learning about one woman would help me understand the other. I took the last sip of my coffee, and there at thebottom of the schnitzel mug Halley had once given me I saw my own reflection, a tiny, ghostly, glistening version of me.
The phone rang and rang. Edith didn’t answer.
So much of how we behave in life comes from movies and television, from roles other people have played. Maybe I’d seen too many old episodes ofDragnet. I took the white pages down from the pantry shelf where we kept it. I opened it like a sacred tome. I know I’d seen this scene before in a movie. The camera cuts to a close-up of the telephone directory, of a finger scanning down a column of tiny print.
Doucet. Two listings.
I lifted the receiver. Our kitchen phone was an old rotary. I watched the dial spin. I heard the smooth trilling of the call, like birds. Wyatt used to love to watch the birds each morning. He kept thePeterson Field Guide to Birds of North Americaon our back porch. So attentive when he chose to be.
Two more rings, then an operator’s voice:This number has been disconnected.
Who did I think I was, Magnum P.I.? My resolve began to falter, but then I thought of the Earthshine Girl, me, wearing a slip, a mud mask. Me wearing that wedding dress. I thought of me, the Earthshine Girl, as that plumber dressed in white overalls, my hair curved under my cap. I was a lady plumber—that was the whole joke.
“If she’s a plumber, wouldn’t she befixingthe sink? Unclogging the sink? Repairing the sink?” I remember Linda Gibbons, my roommate from the conservatory, asking. “Didn’t it feel dirty?”
“Soap?” I had said, and the other girls laughed, even though I hadn’t meant to be funny. The lady plumber secretly embodied their fears: They didn’t want to be women trying to make it in a man’s world.
I thought of the Earthshine Girl, me, as a nurse, as a secretary, as a Native American—Use Earthshine in every teepee—me, as a cook, a teacher, a wife, a mother, me, the Earthshine Girl who held a canister of soap toward the camera with two hands, pleading with women to buy it.
Cradling that phone, I was thinking of all the ways the EarthshineGirl had been crafted to be good, obliging, pleasing, deferential, only secretly clever. Iwasthe Earthshine Girl. I’d been trained to neglect my own needs, and that wasn’t virtue. That wasn’t talent. It was fear.
I willed myself to be brave for Halley.
The next call rang five times, and just when I was about to hang up, a woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”
I briefly remembered something I’d read, about how Thomas Edison was the one who encouraged the etiquette of sayinghellowhen answering the phone. How else to address the unknown but to acknowledge it? Edison was deaf, and he claimed his deafness allowed him to tune out meaningless sound and focus. He considered his deafness a gift.
“Hello?” I said.
The woman on the other end was old. Her voice was scratchy, like she’d just woken up. I could hearWheel of Fortunein the background, and I apologized for interrupting, but I was doing a bit of research, trying to track someone down, and I wondered if she had any relation to someone named Opal Doucet.
I listened to the woman’s breathing, heavy, like a smoker’s, the whimsical pinging of letters illuminating on the TV.
“You a Doucet, honey?” She pronounced it like “Do Sit.”
“No,” I said.
“What’s that clicking noise?” she said.
“I didn’t hear it,” I said.
