Brunonia Barry - The Lace Reader

—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

WHEN THE PHONE CALL COMES IN, I am dreaming of water. Not the warm blues and greens of the California beach towns where I live now, but the dark New England Atlantic of my youth. In my dream I am swimming to the moon. Like all dreams, it seems logical. The idea that there is no pathway between sea and moon never occurs.

I swim my own combination: part breaststroke, part drownproofing: slow and purposeful, a rhythm remembered from another lifetime. The movement is all efficiency, with just nose, ears, and eyes protruding above the water, mouth submerged. With each forward stroke, tiny waves of salt enter my open mouth, then recede again as I slow, mirroring the larger surrounding ocean.

I swim for a long time. Past Salem Harbor and the swells. Past any sight of land at all. I swim until the sea becomes still and clear, too calm to be any real ocean. The light from the full dream-moon etches a clear path on the black water, a road to follow. There is no sound save my own breath, slow and steady as I swim.

This was once my sister’s dream. Now it is only mine.

The rhythm of movement gives way to a sound rhythm as the telephone rings again and then again. This is one of the only phones that actually rings anymore, and part of the reason I agreed to take this house-sitting job. It is the kind of phone we might have had on our island. That’s the one interesting thing about what has happened to me. I am encouraged to rewrite my own history. In the history I am writing, May actually has a phone.

My therapist, Dr. Fukuhara, is a Jungian. She believes in symbols and shadows. As do I. But my therapy has stopped for the time being. We have come to an impasse , was the way Dr. Fukuhara put it. I laughed when she said it. Not because it was funny but because it was the kind of cliché that my Aunt Eva would use.

On the fourth ring, the answering machine picks up. The machine is old also, not as old as the phone, but the kind where you can screen calls and hear a little bit of the message before you decide whether it’s worth it to actually speak to a live person.

My brother’s voice sounds tinny and too loud.

I stretch to pick up, pulling the surgery stitches that are still inside me, the ones that haven’t yet dissolved.

“What?” I say.

“I’m sorry to wake you,” Beezer says.

I remember falling asleep on this couch last night, too tired to get up, hypnotized by the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sound of Santana playing over the hill at the Greek.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I wouldn’t have called you, but…”

“But May’s in trouble again.” It’s the only time Beezer ever calls these days. At last count, May has been arrested six times in her efforts to help abuse victims. Recently my brother informed me that he’d put the number of the local bail bondsman on his speed dial.

“It’s not May,” he says.

My throat tightens.

“It’s Eva.”

Dead , I’m thinking. Oh, my God, Eva is dead .

“She’s missing, Towner.”

Missing. The word has no meaning. “Missing” is the last word I expected to hear.

Palm fronds clatter against the open window. It’s already way too hot. Clear Santa Ana sky, earthquake weather. I reach up to pull the window shut. The cat runs scratches across my legs as it lunges for the freedom of the canyon, leaping through the window as it slams, catching just a few tail hairs, the last trace of what was here just moments ago and is now gone, that fast. Immediately the cat scratches on my legs begin to welt.

“Towner?”

“Yeah?”

“I think you’d better come home.”

“Yeah,” I say, “yeah, okay.”

It is called Ipswich lace, or bobbin lace, or bone lace. It is made on bolster pillows held on the laps of the women. The pillows are round or elliptical and most resemble the muffs that Victorian women later carried to keep their hands warm while riding in their carriages. Each woman makes her own pillow, and those pillows are as individual as the women themselves. In old Ipswich the pillows were pieced together from bits of fabric, then stuffed with beach grass .

—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

THE SALEM NEWS HAS ALREADY picked up the story about Eva’s disappearance: “Elderly Woman Missing Ten Days” and “Lace Reader of Salem Vanishes.” Eva used to send me the Salem paper. It was around the time that May started making the headlines. For a while I actually read them. My mother’s clashes with the police over her tactics for saving abused women were becoming famous and made for good copy. Eventually I stopped reading the papers and would leave them on the porch in their wrappers until my landlord would get fed up and take them to Santa Monica for recycling or, if it was winter, roll them up tightly and burn them in her fireplace like logs.

The paper speculates that Eva just wandered away. A woman interviewed from the Salem Council on Aging suggests tagging the elderly residents of Salem. It evokes an interesting image—cops with ear tags and tranquilizer guns rounding up old people. Realizing she’s gone too far with her suggestion, the woman goes on to say: “This kind of thing happens all the time. Salem is a small city. I’m sure she couldn’t have gotten far.”

The woman clearly didn’t know my aunt.

The ferry from Boston lets me off on Derby Street, a few blocks from the House of the Seven Gables, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cousin grew up. I am named after Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, although the spelling is different; my name is spelled Sophya. I was brought up to believe that Ms. Peabody was a distant relative, but I found out from Eva that we weren’t related to the Peabodys at all, that May simply found Sophia interesting, and appropriated her as our own. (So now you see which side of the family the lying thing comes from.) By the time it would have bothered me, May and I were hardly speaking anyway. I had already moved in with Aunt Eva. I had changed my name to Towner and wouldn’t answer to anything else. So it didn’t matter all that much.

I’m walking for a long time. The estrogen patch on my arm begins to itch. I have a rash from it, but I don’t know what to do about that, short of ripping the damned thing off. I figure the rash is probably from the heat. I’d forgotten how hot it can get in New England in the summer, and how humid. Ahead of me tourists swarm. Buses line the lot at the Gables, jamming the side streets. People move in groups, snapping photos, stuffing souvenirs into bags that are already far too full.

Around every corner of Salem lurks a history lesson. Dead ahead as I walk is the Custom House with its gold roof. This is where Hawthorne worked his day job, an appointed position as clerk. Using the locals as subject matter, revealing their secrets, Hawthorne basically wrote his way out of this town, escaping west to Concord before the townspeople remembered their talent with the old tar and feathers. Still, now they celebrate Hawthorne as their own. The same way they celebrate the witches, who never existed at all in the days of the witch trials but who thrive here in great numbers now.

A kid steps in front of me, asking directions to the common. There are three kids actually, two girls and a boy. All in black. Goths , is my first thought, but no, definitely young witches. What gives it away finally is the BLESSED BE T-shirt worn by one of the girls.

I point. “Follow the yellow brick road,” I say. Actually it’s a tour line painted on the street, and it’s red, not yellow, but they get the idea. A man in a huge Frankenstein head walks by, handing out flyers. I want to call for the continuity person, but this isn’t a movie set. A cruiser slows, the cop looks at the kids, then at me. The boy spots the witch logo on the side of the police car, gives the cop a big thumbs-up. Frankenstein hands each of us a Freaky Tours flyer and sneezes inside his big hollow head. “Universal tours without the budget” is what Beezer calls this place. I heard from my brother that Salem is trying to shed its image as Witch City. He told me last year that they were attempting to pass an ordinance to limit the number of haunted houses that can be erected within one city block. From the look of things, the ordinance didn’t pass.