Lady Oracle

  The memory of this darkness, this winter, the leggings, and the soft snow weighing down the branches of the willow trees in the ravine so that they made a bluish arch over the bridge, the white vista from its edge that should have been so beautiful, I associate with misery. Because by that time Elizabeth and her troop had discovered my secret: they had discovered how easy it was to make me cry. At our school young girls weren't supposed to hit each other or fight or rub snow in each other's faces, and they didn't. During recess they stayed in the Girls' Yard, where everything was whispering and conspiracy. Words were not a prelude to war but the war itself, a devious, subterranean war that was unending because there were no decisive acts, no knockdown blows that could be delivered, no point at which you could say I give in. She who cried first was lost.

  Elizabeth, Marlene and Lynne were in other grades or they would have found out about me sooner. I was a public sniveler still, at the age of eight; my feelings were easily hurt, despite my mother, who by this time was telling me sharply to act my age. She herself was flint-eyed, distinct, never wavery or moist; it was not until later that I was able to reduce her to tears, a triumph when I finally managed it.

  Elizabeth was the leader of the Gnomes, and I was one of her five followers during those dusty Tuesdays of rituals and badges and the sewing on of buttons. It was over knots that I came to grief. We had mastered the reef, and Tawny Owl, who was the knot specialist, had decided we were ready for the clove hitch; so with her lanyard - from the end of which hung a splendid and enviable silver whistle - looped over a chairback, she was demonstrating. I was cross-eyed with concentration, I was watching so hard I didn't see a thing, and when it came my turn to duplicate the magic feat the rope slipped through my fingers like spaghetti and I was left with nothing but a snarl. Tawny Owl did it again, for my benefit, but with no better results.

  "Joan, you weren't paying attention," Tawny Owl said.

  "But I was" I said earnestly.

  Tawny Owl huffed up. Unlike Brown Owl, she knew about the things that went on behind her back, which made her suspicious. She took my protest for lippiness. "If you won't cooperate, Gnomes, I'll just have to go over and work with the Pixies. I'm sure they are more interested in learning." And she marched off, taking her whistle with her. Of course I started oozing right away. I hated being falsely accused. I hated being accused accurately too, but injustice was worse.

  Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She was about to say something, but Brown Owl, ever alert, came trotting over and said brightly, "Now, now, Joan, we don't like to see unhappy faces at Brownies; we like to see cheerfulness. Remember, 'Frowns and scowls make ugly things, Smiling gives them fairy wings.' " This only made me cry harder, and I had to be secluded in the cloakroom so as not to embarrass everyone until I had, as Brown Owl put it, got my Brownie smile back again. "You must learn to control yourself," she said kindly, patting me on the beret as I heaved and choked. She didn't know what a lot of territory this covered.

  That blue-black evening, as we crunched our way home over the snow, Elizabeth paused under the last streetlight before the bridge and looked at the others. Then, without warning, they all took off down the hill in a flurry of hilarious giggles and disappeared into the darkness of the ravine before I knew what was happening, shouting back, "The bad man's gonna getcha!" - abandoning me at the top of the hill to make the crossing by myself. First I called, then I ran after them, but they were too far ahead. I sniffled over the bridge, wiping my mucous nose on the backs of my mittens and glancing fearfully behind me, though of course no child molester or exposure artist in his right mind would have been abroad in near-zero weather. They would all have been lurking in railroad stations or the backs of churches, but I didn't know this. I heaved my way up the final hill; they were waiting in ambush at the top.

  "Are you ever a crybaby," Elizabeth said with scorn and delight, and that set the pattern for the rest of the year.

  The game for the three of them was to think up ingenious variations. Sometimes they would just run off; other times they would threaten to run off. Sometimes they would claim that their running off was a punishment, deserved by me, for something I had done or hadn't done that day: I had skipped too heavily in the fairy ring, I hadn't stood straight enough, my tie was rumpled, I had dirty fingernails, I was fat. Sometimes they would say they wouldn't run off, or would swear to come back and get me, if I would only perform certain acts: I had to crawl around in the snow, barking like a dog, or throw a snowball at a passing old lady, whereupon they would point at me and jeer, "She did it! She did it!" Sometimes they would ask me, "What would the bad man do to you if he caught you?" It wasn't enough for me to say I didn't know; they would merely take flight, giggling behind their hands: "She doesn't know, she doesn't know!" I spent half an hour one night standing at the top of the hill, singing over and over in a quavering voice, a hundred times exactly, "We're the Brownies, here's our aim, Lend a hand and play the game," before I realized they weren't going to keep their promise and retrieve me. Once they told me to stick my tongue onto an iron fence on the way down to the ravine, but it wasn't cold enough and my tongue didn't freeze to the fence as they'd hoped.

  The funny thing was that though the conditions, directions and demands were issued by Elizabeth, I knew it was the other two who thought them up. Lynne was especially inventive: her position was precarious, she didn't have strength of character, she could so easily turn into me. I couldn't tell my mother about any of this because I felt that whatever she would say, underneath it her sympathies would lie with them. "Stand up for yourself," she would exhort. How could a daughter of hers have turned out to be such a limp balloon?

  Sometimes, when they'd left me alone in the darkness and cold, I would stand there almost hoping that the bad man would really come up out of the ravine and do whatever he was fated to do. That way, after I'd been stolen or killed, they would be punished, and they would be forced to repent at last for what they'd done. I imagined him as a tall man, very tall, in a black suit, heaving up out of the snow like an avalanche in reverse, blue-faced and covered with ice, red-eyed, hairy-headed, with long sharp teeth like icicles. He would be frightening but at least he would be an end to this misery that went on and seemed as if it would go on forever. I would be taken away by him, no trace of me would ever be found. Even my mother would be sorry. Once I actually waited for him, counting under my breath - he would come after a hundred, he would come after two hundred - for so long that I was half an hour late for dinner and my mother was furious.

  "What have you been doing?" she said.

  "Playing," I said, and she told me I was selfish and inconsiderate.

  The snow finally changed to slush and then to water, which trickled down the hill of the bridge in two rivulets, one on either side of the path; the path itself turned to mud. The bridge was damp, it smelled rotten, the willow branches turned yellow, the skipping ropes came out. It was light again in the afternoons, and on one of them, when for a change Elizabeth hadn't run off but was merely discussing the possibilities with the others, a real man actually appeared.

  He was standing at the far side of the bridge, a little off the path, holding a bunch of daffodils in front of him. He was a nice-looking man, neither old nor young, wearing a good tweed coat, not at all shabby or disreputable. He didn't have a hat on, his taffy-colored hair was receding and the sunlight gleamed on his high forehead. I was walking ahead, as ordered (they liked to keep an eye on me from behind), and the others were deep in their plans, so I saw him first. He smiled at me, I smiled back, and he lifted his daffodils up to reveal his open fly and the strange, ordinary piece of flesh that was nudging flaccidly out of it.

  "Look," I said to the others, as if I had just discovered something of interest. They did look, and immediately began to scream and run up the hill. I was so startled - by them, not by him - that I didn't move.

  The man looked slightly dismayed. His pleasant smile faded and he turned away, pulling his coat together, and be
gan to walk in the other direction, across the bridge. Then he turned back, made a little bow to me, and handed me the daffodils.

  The others were waiting above, clustered a safe way along the street. "What did he say? What did he do?" they asked. "Don't you know that was a bad man? You sure had the nerve," Elizabeth said grudgingly. For once I had impressed them, though I wasn't sure why; there hadn't been anything frightening about the man, he had smiled. I liked the daffodils too, though I threw them into a ditch before I reached our house. I was astute enough to know that I wouldn't be able to explain where I'd got them in a way my mother would approve of.

  On the walk home from the next Brownie meeting the girls were especially nice to me, and I thought that now, after my long probation, I was going to become their friend. That seemed to be true, because Elizabeth said, "Would you like to be in our club? We have a club, you know." This was the first I'd heard of it, though clubs were popular at school, but yes, of course I wanted to be in it. "You have to go through the ceremony first," Marlene said. "It isn't hard."

  We knew all about ceremonies, Brownies was full of them, and I think they got some of the details of what followed from the joining-up ritual, in which you were led across cardboard stepping stones that read CHEERFULNESS, OBEDIENCE, GOOD TURNS and SMILES. You then had to close your eyes and be turned around three times, while the pack chanted,

  Twist me and turn me and show me the elf,

  I looked in the water and there saw ...

  Here you were supposed to open your eyes, look into the enchanted pool, which was a hand-mirror surrounded by plastic flowers and ceramic bunnies, and say, "Myself." The magic word.

  So when Elizabeth said, "Close your eyes," I closed them. Marlene and Lynne each took one of my hands, and I felt something soft being tied across my eyes. Then they took me downhill, warning Brownies. It was too bad, because I really did like it. Brown Owl was one of the most pleasant women I had encountered so far, besides Aunt Lou, and I missed her.

  My mother used this incident as an example of my own fecklessness and general lack of wisdom. "You were stupid to let the other girls fool you like that," she said.

  "I thought they were my friends," I said.

  "Friends wouldn't tie you up like that, would they? And in that ravine. Who knows what might have happened to you. You could've been killed. You were just lucky that nice man came along and untied you when he did, that's all."

  "Mother," I said solemnly, eager to redeem myself in some way but unsure how to do it - perhaps by demonstrating that she was wrong? - "I think that was a bad man."

  "Don't be an idiot," she said. "That nice man?"

  "I think he was the same one. The daffodil man."

  "What daffodil man?" she asked. "What have you been doing?"

  "Nothing," I said, backpedaling frantically; but it was too late, the first worm was out of the can and the rest had to follow. My mother was not pleased. In addition to everything else, I was now accused of sneaking around behind her back: I should have told her immediately.

  I still wasn't sure, though: was it the daffodil man or not? Was the man who untied me a rescuer or a villain? Or, an even more baffling thought: was it possible for a man to be both at once?

  I turned this puzzle over in my mind time after time, trying to remember and piece together the exact features of the daffodil man. But he was elusive, he melted and changed his shape like butterscotch or warm gum, dissolving into a tweedy mist, sending out menacing tentacles of flesh and knotted rope, forming again as a joyful sunburst of yellow flowers.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  One of the bad dreams I used to have about my mother was this. I would be walking across the bridge and she would be standing in the sunlight on the other side of it, talking to someone else, a man whose face I couldn't see. When I was halfway across, the bridge would start to collapse, as I'd always feared it would. Its rotten planks buckled and split, it tilted over sideways and began to topple slowly into the ravine. I would try to run but it would be too late, I would throw myself down and grab onto the far edge as it rose up, trying to slide me off. I called out to my mother, who could still have saved me, she could have run across quickly and reached out her hand, she could have pulled me back with her to firm ground - But she didn't do this, she went on with her conversation, she didn't notice that anything unusual was happening. She didn't even hear me.

  In the other dream I would be sitting in a corner of my mother's bedroom, watching her put on her makeup. I did this often as a small child: it was considered a treat, a privilege, by both my mother and myself, and refusing to let me watch was one of my mother's ways of punishing me. She knew I was fascinated by her collection of cosmetics and implements: lipsticks, rouges, perfume in dainty bottles which I longed to have, bright red nail polish (sometimes, as an exceptional bribe, I was allowed to have some brushed on my toes, but never on my fingers: "You're not old enough," she'd say), little tweezers, nail files and emery boards. I was forbidden to touch any of these things. Of course I did, when she was out, but they were arranged in such rigid rows both on the dressertop and in the drawers that I had to be very careful to put them back exactly where I'd found them. My mother had a hawk's eye for anything out of place. I later extended this habit of snooping through her drawers and cupboards until I knew everything that each of them contained; finally I would do it not to satisfy my curiosity - I already knew everything - but for the sense of danger. I only got caught twice, early on: once when I ate a lipstick (even then, at the age of four, I was wise enough to replace the cover on the tube and the tube in the drawer, and to wash my mouth carefully; how did she know it was me?), and once when I couldn't resist covering my entire face with blue eye shadow, to see how I would look blue. That got me exiled for weeks. I almost gave the whole game away the day I found a curious object, like a rubber clamshell, packed away neatly in a box. I was dying to ask her what it was, but I didn't dare.

  "Sit there quietly, Joan, and watch Mother put on her face," she'd say on the good days. Then she would tuck a towel around her neck and go to work. Some of the things she did seemed to be painful; for instance, she would cover the space between her eyebrows with what looked like brown glue, which she heated in a little pot, then tear it off, leaving a red patch; and sometimes she'd smear herself with pink mud which would harden and crack. She often frowned at herself, shaking her head as if she was dissatisfied; and occasionally she'd talk to herself as if she'd forgotten I was there. Instead of making her happier, these sessions appeared to make her sadder, as if she saw behind or within the mirror some fleeting image she was unable to capture or duplicate; and when she was finished she was always a little cross.

  I would stare at the proceedings, fascinated and mute. I thought my mother was very beautiful, even more beautiful when she was colored in. And this was what I did in the dream: I sat and stared. Although her vanity tables became more grandiose as my father got richer, my mother always had a triple mirror, so she could see both sides as well as the front of her head. In the dream, as I watched, I suddenly realized that instead of three reflections she had three actual heads, which rose from her toweled shoulders on three separate necks. This didn't frighten me, as it seemed merely a confirmation of something I'd always known; but outside the door there was a man, a man who was about to open the door and come in. If he saw, if he found out the truth about my mother, something terrible would happen, not only to my mother but to me. I wanted to jump up, run to the door, and stop him, but I couldn't move and the door would swing slowly inward....

  As I grew older, this dream changed. Instead of wanting to stop the mysterious man, I would sit there wishing for him to enter. I wanted him to find out her secret, the secret that I alone knew: my mother was a monster.

  I can never remember calling her anything but Mother, never one of those childish diminutives; I must have, but she must have discouraged it. Our relationship was professionalized early. She was to be the manager, the creator, the agent; I wa
s to be the product. I suppose one of the most important things she wanted from me was gratitude. She wanted me to do well, but she wanted to be responsible for it.

  Her plans for me weren't specific. They were vague but large, so that whatever I did accomplish was never the right thing. But she didn't push all the time; for days and even weeks she would seem to forget me altogether. She would become involved in some other project of hers, like redecorating her bedroom or throwing a party. She even took a couple of jobs: she was a travel agent, for instance, and she once worked for an interior decorator, searching out lamps and carpets that would match living-room color designs. But none of these jobs lasted long, she would get discouraged, they weren't enough for her and she would quit.

  It wasn't that she was aggressive and ambitious, although she was both these things. Perhaps she wasn't aggressive or ambitious enough. If she'd ever decided what she really wanted to do and had gone out and done it, she wouldn't have seen me as a reproach to her, the embodiment of her own failure and depression, a huge edgeless cloud of inchoate matter which refused to be shaped into anything for which she could get a prize.

  In the image of her that I carried for years, hanging from my neck like an iron locket, she was sitting in front of her vanity table, painting her fingernails a murderous red and sighing. Her lips were thin but she made a larger mouth with lipstick over and around them like Bette Davis, which gave her a curious double mouth, the real one showing through the false one like a shadow. She was an attractive woman, even into her late thirties, she had kept her figure, she had been popular in her youth. In her photograph album there were snapshots of her in party dresses and bathing suits, with various young men, her looking at the camera, the young men looking at her. One young man recurred often, in white flannels, with a big motor car. She said she'd been engaged to him, more or less.

  There were no pictures of her as a girl though, none of her parents, none of the two brothers and the sister I later found out she had. She almost never talked about her family or her early life, though I was able to piece a little of it together. Her parents had both been very strict, very religious. They hadn't been rich; her father had been a stationmaster for the CPR. She'd done something that offended them - what it was I never learned - and she'd run away from home at the age of sixteen and never gone back. She'd worked at various jobs, clerking in Kresge's, waitressing. When she was eighteen she'd been a waitress at a resort in Muskoka, which was where she later met my father. The young men in the pictures were guests at the resort. She could only wear the party dresses and the bathing suits on her day off.