She can’t stop me now.
• • •
Even as she accepts her fate, my mother won’t give up, not entirely. She doesn’t know where she’s going, or when, but she knows she’ll go somewhere, sometime, and she’s got to be prepared. The coins keep disappearing from my father’s pay packet.
As for him, he notices the coins going, but he doesn’t notice that my mother has stopped wearing her corset. He hasn’t noticed the bruises either, or all that jumping off chairs. He’s been home so little, he’s unaware that Thomas Argument no longer visits. It’s true he hasn’t seen any new presents from Argument around the house. But then, that’s been the case, regardless, for quite a while. All the presents have been disappearing, along with those mysterious missing coins, into the traveling trunk my father is too much a gentleman to open.
What does he think is going to jump out at him if he does? A Persian div, perhaps? A Persian div with a face like an Argument?
• • •
In fact he has no fixed ideas on that question. He has simply averted his eyes. As long as he doesn’t look, the trunk is empty. It’s a metaphysical proposition.
He doesn’t know that what is in that trunk is:
Me.
Because I’m bearing down on his life, too. Not just hers. Bearing down like a steam engine. And I’m going to arrive, whether he opens his eyes or not.
• • •
At the moment, all my father really thinks about is glass. His thoughts are crystalline structures, chemical compositions, elastic solids, melting points. He thinks that he is thinking about my mother, too—and he does think about her, in a way, in a very specific way. He thinks not about my flesh-and-blood mother (who is throwing up, and throwing herself off chairs, and bouncing off beds, and tumbling desperately down staircases, and drinking toxic herb teas, all outside his notice), but rather about a Clotilde-in-his-head, she who exists in a vitreous rather than a fleshly state; malleable, it is true, if sufficiently heated, but mostly static, her molecules silent, slowed, suspended—glittering, like stars. Like a star she is distant, shiny, beautiful. Her movement is infinite yet indiscernible. As the flesh-and-blood Clotilde prepares to leave him for Thomas Argument, this other is drawing closer, one gleaming molecule at a time.
He does not see her yet. She is veiled still, just out of sight, a spark, balanced at the knife-edge of his perception.
Thomas Argument woos my real mother (so my father thinks), creating, with his magic lantern, spectacles writ large: Vesuvius. Pompeii. The Great Fire. While Leopold my father remakes her, suspends her in glass. His is a spectacle of the infinitely small, stopped in time: her initials entwined forever in the bud of a glass sea anemone. The rosy, pink tips of the tentacles, delicate as fingers. The engorged fronds of a nudibranch. Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette, lavender freckled, tapering, thin as a coin at its thickest extremity, its underside a creamy, opalescent rainbow. Glass made flesh.
This is what my father is thinking about.
My mother, my real mother, hardly even impinges, though he thinks he is doing it all for her sake.
Honestly, he has no idea what he is doing.
Harry Owen’s Darling Solenette, instead of my darling Clotilde.
• • •
During the months she has been simultaneously feeding me and fighting me with the very marrow of her bones, he has been gestating something of his own, too, wasting William Cloverdale’s glass, but succeeding, at last, with these three models, the anemone, the nudibranch, and the Darling Solenette. There are flaws, certainly. Despite his efforts they still do not, for example, look wet.