“WHAT HAPPENED?” WYATT SAID THEnext day when I opened the door with that ridiculous haircut. He’d come over to pick up some things: his mail, his racquetball goggles, some snow boots I’d never seen him wear. He rang the doorbell instead of using the key. “Your hair is… uh…” His face drooped with concern.
“They wrote me off,” I said. “Stella—she died for good.” I musthave looked feral with my mess of hair, my eyes wild. I was wearing his jeans, and they sat low on my waist.
“She always comes back,” he said.
“Not this time.” He reached for my hair and ran his fingers through it, studying it like a problem to be solved. “It’s awful, I know.”
Wyatt led me to the bathroom and put a towel over my shoulders. He had me sit on the edge of the tub. From his grooming kit he withdrew the razor, and he swapped out the attachment and clicked a piece of plastic into place. He turned it on. I felt the buzzing in my head and down through my arms to my chest. All that buzzing reminded me of those 1950s fat-jiggling machines, the ones that promised weight loss without the work. I watched my hair fall to the ground in clumps.
“Fresh start,” Wyatt said.
I ran my hand over my head—so soft. Softer than Prell shampoo could ever make it. Not coarse from hairspray or gels or chemical perms. More like the pelt of an animal.
In the mirror, I was surprised at the image of myself: my neck, which looked sleeker than ever before, the boxy angle of my jawline, the contours of my face, which appeared so different without the counterpoint of hair. My face looked brighter, despite the signs of age that had settled into my skin: the quotation marks at the sides of my eyes, the parentheses around my mouth, as though everything I said was an aside.
“Fresh start,” I said.
He removed the towel from my shoulders and brushed the hair from my neck. He’d thought to plug the tub so the drain wouldn’t clog, and I loved this part of him, his foresight, his practicality. He found an old bread bag and began collecting my hair in it.
“How are your plants?” I asked. The room blurred from my tears. I didn’t want to cry. Wyatt put his arm around me, then pulled me into him, and let me cry there, in the hollow of his chest, a place that felt warm and dark and familiar.
I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, not for the affair he didn’t even know about—not yet—but for all of it, for our lives not leading where we thought they would take us. For not being me in real life. For being a cliché. Melodramatic. Made for TV. I’d saved the authentic parts of myself for the camera. My real life is where I’d done the performing.
Nobody ever tells you that at some point in a marriage, you may start to loathe the person you’ve become. Nobody ever tells you that you imagine car wrecks and downed planes and sunken ships with your spouse on board, and what shocks you isn’t these fantasies but your reaction to them. You aren’t always sad.
But sometimes you are.
Wyatt kissed the top of my head, and I felt the distance in that kiss. He used to like to tell the story of how we met: late summer, my classmate’s Labor Day cookout. We all jumped into the pool with our clothes on after a few too many gin and tonics. I don’t know what had happened to us. Falling in love is like jumping into that pool; it’s exhilarating. Intoxicating. You feel so alive. But then you have to climb back to the real world, and the air is cold, and your clothes are heavy with water, and there’s a lot more effort to that, to the climbing out.
“Good thing you have a symmetrical head,” Wyatt said.
They killed off Stella, but Stella, she always came back. She fashioned weapons out of jewelry. She filled her belly with earthworms. She sucked moisture from roots. She could hoist herself up through rock and mud. Like Opal Doucet, she could dig herself out of any grave.
1910
Bertie had been right: The Earthshine strike stopped the sale of the factory. But it did not stop Charles Tuttle. A week later he stood on Opal’s stoop.
He wore a dark suit and a fedora, and he smelled of cologne. He held a strange-looking box. Opal studied it more closely. A wooden bell box. Atop it were two bronze call bells, and Opal couldn’t help but think that all objects designed by men resembled breasts.
Standing behind Tuttle were two others, whom Tuttle now introduced: an alderman named Arnold Jenkins and Colonel Davis Bloodworth, a medical doctor and a veteran of the Spanish-American War.
She tried to put it all together: the men, the bell box. Jenkins wore a camera on a strap around his neck and produced an official-looking document from his suit pocket. “We understand it was you who encouraged the Earthshine Girls to strike,” he said. “This is my district.”
Suddenly she understood. She took the paper, and the whole world stilled. In eighteen days she’d receive the Dowd money. Now she imagined herself wearing the uniform of a workhouse inmate: shabby shift, gray apron, a skirt made of material that would chafe—punishing women even sartorially. She wondered if Bertie knew where her husband was right now, and, if so, if she’d tried to stop him. Why hadn’t Opal been warned?
She pleaded with Tuttle. “Gentlemen, you’re mistaken. Albert Bremen spoke to them. Not me.”
“Hogwash,” said Tuttle.
“If Bremen delivered the message, then we’d like to speak to him,” said Jenkins. “Directly. You can do that, yes?” He stepped up to the landing. Opal took a step back into the doorway.
“We’re simply here to observe,” Colonel Bloodworth said. “I assure you that’s our only goal this evening.” He had a scar beneath his eye from an old injury. It resembled the track a tear might take, and as such made him appear tender from the start.
Within minutes they all sat in Opal’s parlor. They brought two chairs from her kitchen. She took her time extinguishing the fire by heaping ashes on the flames. She drew the window shades. She’d done this before, she told herself. She tried to take deep breaths to calm herself, but still she felt lightheadedness coming on.
Colonel Bloodworth watched her as she withdrew candles from the sideboard. She felt the pressure of his gaze, like his eyeballs were an instrument he was using to measure her. While the other men busied themselves taking off their coats, he removed a small journal and a pencil from his pocket and jotted some notes.
Opal lit the candle at the center of the table, the smoke from the extinguished match curlicuing away from the burnt tip. The room smelled of musk and shaving cream, of sweat and gasoline. Of men. Jenkins slumped a bit forward on his chair, tapping his foot. His lips were pursed, not unlike a kiss, but a pained one.
