The Glass Ocean(100)

            But not yet. Not yet. It hasn’t started, yet.

            He reaches out then, and removes a tangle from my hair. So things begin, by small gestures, incrementally.

            Is your Ma in there with him?

            Nah. She’s in house.

            The cold rain is coming down on us, sharp with icy insinuations.

            Golden, is she? Your Ma.

            Yes: she is golden. Very golden. With her white skin, slender body, tiny, delicate feet. The whorl of her ear like a seashell. Her teeth are pearls, her lips are corals. Hip grins his rat-toothed grin and I feel myself stung with something—some nettled, tangled thing inserting its hooks, they won’t come out easily. They will rub and rub me now, chafe. I haven’t been jealous of her before, not like this. Other ways, but not this way.

            She’s in t’house, playing piano.

            Oh. Disappointed breath upon the air. I thort I saw her, is all.

            You didn’.

            My basket is on his arm by now, we are making our way down Bridge Street, over the rioting turmoil of the river, toward the market. He will accompany me, or so it seems. Except when we reach the turning for Grape Lane, suddenly he says he must tend his master’s horses. It is hard for me to imagine this. I try to picture him with currycombs, buckets of mash, raking out the warm, soft straw, none of this is possible. Hefting his master’s suitcase. No. No. Not he. He does not work at anything, though later he will attribute certain of his absences to My master’s travels. Hip has no master, I feel this strongly, a form of intuition. Work leaves its mark, and he doesn’t have it. He’s been marked by something else. I don’t know what.

            Nonetheless, very quickly, with an action like the dissipation of smoke in air, a conjuror’s trick, he is gone, and I alone as usual must make my way wherever it is I am going.

            I grow preoccupied then, once I am alone, without him to distract me. I haven’t thought of her this way before, the way he has just made me think of her. Certainly, I have thought of her attention, all directed elsewhere, not on me; anywhere but on me; and have been pained thereby. Never, though, have I considered the attention of others, drawn away from me, inevitably, onto her.

            Of course it’s inevitable.

            This stings, now that I know it, it’s like a burr up my sleeve, something I can’t get rid of. I know I’ll think of her this way again, perhaps always, it’s unfortunate. She was one thing, and now she’s become something else, both more and less than herself.

            • • •

            I see him often, after that. A galvanic process has taken place, a fusing, however imperfect, by which we find each other again and again in the dark winter afternoons and the nights aglow with the cold reflective sheen of snow, white nights, during which a girl may lose herself in the secret alleys and passageways of this city, in the many places where a boy may be met, or not, depending on his mood, and hers, outside the watchful gaze of parents’ eyes—particularly if those parents are not watching—if they are turned away, eyes averted; father at his bench, mother at her spinet, not bothering; everyone knows mothers watch best and closest, though in my case, not at all.

            • • •

            I seen your Ma, he says, in the window, her hair were like a shiny rope, hanging down.

            • • •

            It clutches at me, around the heart.

            She weren’t in the window, say I.

            She were.

            I know it is a lie.

            • • •