The Lace Reader (4 page)

Barry

May would never leave Yellow Dog Island for long. For this reason she didn’t take us to Salem for haircuts, but to a barber in Marblehead who had a shop only a few feet from the public landing. Old Mr. Dooling always smelled strongly of stale whiskey and fried food and vaguely of camphor. He was likely to wound you anytime before noon. Rumor had it he’d once slashed a kid’s ear right off. My mother insisted she’d never believed that story. Still, May always booked our hair appointments in the afternoons, when the barber’s hands were steadier and his alcohol haze had burned off along with the harbor fog.

May’s haircuts were Marblehead’s version of a magic show. The townie kids used to form lines up and down Front Street to watch as Mr. Dooling pulled the rattail comb through my mother’s hair. With each pull, the comb would snag on something, then stop. As he reached into the mass to unwind the tangle, he would find and remove everything from sea glass to shells to smooth stones. In one particularly matted tangle, he found a sea horse. Once he even found a postcard sent from Tahiti to someone in Beverly Farms. On it were two Polynesian women, bare breasts covered discreetly by long, straight hair. I never figured out if he was sighing because of the girls and their various attributes or because of their straight, untangled hair that—although it might not have yielded treasures like my mother’s—wouldn’t have required a full bottle of conditioner for a single haircut.

The day my mother and I began to break apart was over a haircut—not hers, but mine. My mother had finished. Beezer had gone next, getting the Whiffle Deluxe, which cost $4.99 and came with a tube of stick-up for the front.

I had never liked having my hair cut, partly because of the wharf rats hanging around outside watching the whole thing and partly because Mr. Dooling’s hands shook so much. On one occasion I covered my ears with Band-Aids before we got to town, figuring they’d be The Lace Reader 27

harder to lop off if the barber made a mistake. But May caught me and made me remove the bandages.

Although I wasn’t fond of haircuts, they had never actually hurt me until that day. I watched as Mr. Dooling fished the scissors out of the blue gook and wiped them on his apron. The first cut sent a jolt through me like an electric shock. I let out a cry.

“What’s wrong?”

“It hurts!”

“What hurts?” May examined my scalp, my ears. Finding nothing amiss, she asked again. “
What
hurts?”

“My hair.”

“The hairs on your head?”

“Yes.”

“Individual hairs?”

“I don’t know.”

She examined me again. “You’re fine,” she said, motioning for him to continue.

Mr. Dooling picked up a lock of hair, fumbled, dropped it. He stopped, put down the scissors, wiped his hands on his apron, then reached for the scissors again, this time dropping them on the floor.

“Jesus Christ,” Beezer said. May shot him a look. The barber went to the back room to get another pair of scissors, unwrapping them from their brown paper and making several practice snips in the air before he reached my side. I gripped the chair arms, bracing as he picked up another lock of hair. I could hear him breathing. I could feel the chafing of cotton against cotton as his arm reached forward. And then I had what the doctors would later cite as my first full-blown hallucination. Visual and auditory, it was a flash cut to Medusa and thousands of writhing snake hairs. Snakes screaming, still moving as they were cut in half. Screaming so loudly that I couldn’t make them stop; terrible animal screams like the time one of the dogs on our island got its leg 28 Brunonia

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caught in the tractor blade. I covered my ears, but the snakes were still screaming. . . . Then my brother’s face, scared, pale, pulled me back, and I realized that the screaming was coming from me. Beezer was standing in front of me calling my name, calling me back. And suddenly I was out of the chair and lunging for the door. The group of kids on the porch parted to let me through. Some of the smaller kids were crying. I ran down the stairs, hearing the door behind me open and slam a second time and Beezer yelling for me to wait.

When he reached the Whaler, I already had the bow and stern lines untied, and he had to make a running jump to get into the boat. He landed facedown, his wind knocked out. “Are you okay?”

he wheezed.

I couldn’t answer him.

I saw him looking back at May, who was out on the porch with Dooling, arms folded across her chest, just watching us. I had to choke the engine three times before it caught and started. Then, ignoring the five-miles-per-hour limit, I opened it up, and my brother and I headed out to sea.

We talked only a few times about what had happened that day. May made two ill-fated attempts to get me to see reason, taking me to town once to talk to Eva about it and the other time calling someone at the Museum of Science in Boston and asking him to explain to me that there were no nerve endings in hair and that it couldn’t possibly hurt when it was cut.

Sometimes, when you look back, you can point to a time when your world shifts and heads in another direction. In lace reading this is called the “still point.” Eva says it’s the point around which everything pivots and real patterns start to emerge. The haircut was the still point for my mother and me, the day everything changed. It The Lace Reader 29

happened in an instant, a millisecond, the flash of a look, the intake of breath.

For two years no one cut my hair. I went around with one long side and one short.

“You’re being ridiculous,” May said to me once, coming at me with a pair of scissors, attempting to finish the haircut and take back her power. “I won’t have it.” But I didn’t let her near me then or anytime after that. We had family dinners every night, sandwiches mostly, because May would shop on the docks only once a month when she went to town. The sandwiches were always served in the formal dining room on the good china and were followed by a small Limoges plate of multivitamins, which my mother referred to as “dessert.” This final course could take a long time to finish, because May required us to eat the vitamins with a dessert fork, all the while practicing polite dinner conversation, something she had learned from Eva.

“I have a question,” I said, balancing two vitamins on my knife. May gave me “the look.” I put my knife down. “Yes?” she said, waiting for me to ask in the small-talk style we had developed in order to keep from really talking about anything.

“Why did you give away my sister?”

Beezer’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the kind of thing we talked about. Ever.

May started to clear the table. I thought I could see a tear forming in the corner of her eye, but it never fell.

After dinner I went to my room. My haven. No one came in anymore. Every night I wore a ski hat to bed with one of May’s nylon stockings under it, covering my scalp, so that she couldn’t come in and trim my hair at night. I rigged my room with booby traps: strings, bells, crystal glasses I’d stolen from the butler’s pantry—anything that would wake me at the first sign of an intruder. It worked. My mother gave up. Once, my dog Skybo, whom Beezer had given to me 30 Brunonia

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for protection the summer before, got so badly tangled in the strings that we had to cut him free, but no one else bothered me. After a while May stopped coming into my room at all, but I never let my guard down, not for one minute.

It was Eva who finally fixed things. One day in late summer, I went to see her at her shop, begging for a lace reading. Except on my birthday, which was a family tradition, I didn’t usually ask Eva to read for me. I didn’t really like to be read—it made me feel creepy—

but I was desperate. I’d lost Skybo. He was an unfixed male, and he had a tendency to wander. He was one of the island golden retrievers, trained by Beezer as a puppy, so even though he was tame enough for the house, he still had a wild streak. He was a great swimmer. Whenever I swam or took the boat, he followed me. Sometimes he set out all by himself.

I was a mess. I’d looked everywhere on Yellow Dog Island. I took the Whaler to town. I searched the wharf, the marine-supply store, and even some of the fishing fleet but turned up nothing. Finally I headed for Eva’s.

She was working on a piece of pillow lace, sitting beside a fireplace that was filled with chrysanthemums instead of flames. It was late in the season, and the water was really cold. I was frantic. I told her the story, told her I feared the worst—hypothermia, maybe, or that he had been caught in a shipping lane and run over. Eva looked at me calmly and told me to get myself a cup of tea.

“I can’t drink tea. My dog is missing,” I snapped. Like May, Eva had also mastered “the look.” I made the tea. She kept working. Every once in a while, she would glance up and gesture to the tea. “Don’t let it get cold,” she said. I sipped. After what seemed a very long time, Eva put down the lace pillow and walked over to where I was sitting. She had a small pair of scissors in her hand, the ones she used to cut the lace free when she fin-The Lace Reader 31

ished a piece, a technique Eva had invented. Instead of cutting lace, she reached over and cut off my braid.

“There,” she said. “The spell is broken. You are free.”

She put the braid down on the table.

“What the hell?”

“Watch your mouth, young lady.”

I stood and glared at her.

“You can go now,” she declared.

“What about my dog?” I snapped.

“Don’t worry about your dog,” she said.

I walked back to the Whaler, wondering if everyone I knew was crazy. I knew I was. May was pretty far gone, getting more reclusive by the minute. And Eva, whom I usually found so logical, was not acting the way she should, not at all.

When I got to the Whaler, Skybo was sitting in the bow. He was wet and tired and covered with burrs, but I was so happy to see him that I didn’t even care where he’d been.

The women created their own patterns made of parchment,
but thicker parchment than for the love letters, more endur-
ing. Pins were pressed into the parchment, creating a pricking
pattern that could be used over and over. For the lace making,
the pins stayed in, holding the patterns to the pillow, and the
lace was woven pin to pin. If there was any limiting factor to
the production of more intricate laces, it was the expense and
scarcity of pins.

—T H E L AC E R E A D E R’ S G U I D E

u

Chapter 5

It is just after sunrise. I cannot get back to sleep. Placing the braid of hair in the drawer of the bedside table, I quietly make my way downstairs. I start to dial Beezer’s number, then decide to wait an hour. I want to tell him that Eva’s all right. Beezer has been great. He doesn’t need this, not now. My brother and his longtime girlfriend, Anya, are about to be married. As soon as exams are over, they will be flying to Norway, where her parents live. After the ceremony they are going to travel around Europe for the summer. They will be so relieved, I think, both that Eva is okay and that they don’t have to change their wedding plans.

I’m making mental notes. Call May. Call the cops. Although none of them deserves a call. I don’t know how any of them could be so 34 Brunonia

Barry

stupid that they couldn’t find an eighty-five-year-old woman in her own house.

I let myself into the tearoom, with its frescoed walls painted by a semifamous artist my great-grandfather had flown in from Italy. I can’t remember the name. Small tables crowd the room. Lace is everywhere. Some of the pieces bear May’s company label, The Circle, but most of them Eva has made herself. A glass counter in the corner holds canisters with every kind of tea imaginable—commercial teas from all over the world, as well as several flower and herb potions that Eva blends. If you want a cup of coffee, you won’t find it here. My eyes scan the teas looking for the one she named after me. She gave me that tea as a present one year. It’s a blend of black tea and cayenne and cinnamon, with just a hint of cilantro, and some other ingredients she won’t reveal to me. It has to be drunk strong and very hot, and Eva tells me it is too spicy for some of her older customers.

“Either you’ll love it or you’ll hate it,” she told me when she gave it to me. I loved it. I used to drink whole pots of it, winters when I lived with Eva. On the canister it’s called “Sophya’s Blend,” but its nickname, just between Eva and me, is “Difficult-Tea.”

Behind the canister is a notebook, its cover a poem I recognize, the Jenny Joseph poem that is getting so popular.
“When I am an
old woman, I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn’t go, and
doesn’t suit me. . . .”
Stuck inside the notebook are some photos, one of Beezer and May and one of me when I first got to California, my forced smile slackened from the Stelazine I was still taking. From the look of things, Eva has a children’s party set up for today. I check the calendar on the wall, but it’s a lunar calendar, not a regular one, and it’s difficult to read. The slivered phases of the moon are printed in shades of gray on the corresponding dates. Just when I begin to think I have it figured out, I spot a different kind of moon, a bright red full moon stuck halfway through the month. It’s a little larger than the other moons and doesn’t correspond to any of The Lace Reader 35

their cycles. It takes me a minute to realize it’s not a moon but a hat. I remember Eva telling me about the Red Hats who were inspired by the poem. The ones who wear purple and come for tea and lace readings here at least once a month.

The tables are already set. Each table has a different pot, with different teacups and saucers set on individual circles of lace. The pots are very fanciful and colorful. If you choose to come for tea on a regular day, one that’s not already booked for a private party, the lace at your table setting, once you use it, is yours to keep. You pay for it, whether or not you have a lace reading done. Many people just take their lace pieces home and use them as doilies. This never bothers Eva, even though I’ve always thought it was a waste, that the lace circles are pieces of art and should be framed. Most of Eva’s customers come for tea really hoping to get a lace reading. Eva never does more than two readings a day anymore; she says it wears her out, particularly now that she’s getting older. She does not keep any money from her readings. All the money she collects for the lace and the readings goes directly to the Circle. She’ll do more than two readings if she has to. And if she senses real disappointment, or something urgent that the seeker should know, she’ll even do the reading for free. But what she’s most interested in is teaching the women to read for themselves. “Pick up the lace and look at it,” she says. “Squint your eyes.” If you follow her instructions, you start to imagine that you see pictures in the lace, the way Eva does. “Go ahead,” she encourages them. “Don’t be afraid. There is no wrong answer. This is your own life you’re reading, your own symbols.”