Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

“Imagine a white sea visible from a deserted house whose windowpanes flash as if the house were wearing spectacles. How myopic that house must be to need so many pairs! It has no idea of who could be looking out and yet each window has a different view.”

“My dear, you must be careful not to confuse amnesia with all that’s missing, all that’s mysterious in life,” Auntie replied. She wore a vermilion kimono that kept falling open to expose her breasts; silver bracelets jangled up her forearms when she drank, revealing scarred wrists. Before a window streaming light and dander, she sipped what she called her afternoon zombie from a cut-glass tumbler shaded by a toothpick parasol. “I’d guess any number of quote ‘normal’ folks feel to some degree a disassociation similar to what you’re describing, my dear, not to mention all the garden-variety mystics, seers, and poets. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to re-create the past. Once it returns, you might find yourself grateful for your respite from it.”

The Girl didn’t disagree. She became convinced that finding herself wasn’t an exercise in recalling her prior life—that was futile, anyway. Rather she needed to dream it. When after her fall she’d regained consciousness, but as a stranger to herself, she had been told her name. Instead of accepting it on faith, she was determined to wait until she remembered it unaided before she accepted it. Until then she would continue to regard herself in the third person as “the Girl.”

Auntie always addressed her as “my dear.”

“My dear, come summer when the lifeguards return, the sea air will do you good, but it’s too dangerous to set foot outside now. The ice appears firm, which only makes it more treacherous.”

“My dear, this house is your home now. Feel free to treat it as your own, but I must ask you not to venture up the stairs. The upper floor is in disrepair, and the attic a den of rabid bats. I lack the funds to rehab. Besides, there’s nothing up there of interest.”

“My dear, if you are going to sit all day staring out, at least put on a sweater. This old house is drafty. Here, this belonged to your mother when she was a girl, or perhaps it was mine, we shared everything. Our parents couldn’t tell us apart. Even we couldn’t tell each other apart except that one of us was right-handed and the other left. Now, isn’t that more comfy?”

The corridor warped with dampness on the forbidden second floor was lined with locked, empty rooms. Auntie complained that when winter turned bitter enough to freeze the cove, the sprawling house became too expensive to heat and she’d had to take in roomers, but they’d repeatedly defaulted on the rent, leaving her no choice but to lock them out and keep their personal belongings as collateral. Others—a lifeguard, a scissor-sharpener, a hurdy-gurdy man, and a ventriloquist among them—simply disappeared, leaving the tools of their trades behind. Tragic outcome aside, Auntie said, the Girl’s parents had had the right idea of escaping to the Tropics. Auntie herself could only fantasize about such a trip, as what scant funds she had were tied up in this ramshackle place.

“At least, my dear, once the settlement comes in you won’t have to scrape by as I have. We— you —should have collected something already but for the crooked lawyers’ claim that the cruise line is exempt from liability in the case of a rogue wave. It’s a game to lawyers to dicker over the price of grief. But the day of reckoning will come.”

Until it did, Auntie kept her own reckoning. While Auntie slept through the late afternoons, with the zombie tumbler tumbled over beside her canopy bed, the Girl would sneak into the study and open the black ledger. In ink the shade of grenadine, beneath columns labeled MY DEAR! a running account in Auntie’s smeary left-handed scrawl detailed each steaming cup of cocoa, each bobbing marshmallow, each animal cracker—enumerated by name: giraffe, monkey, kangaroo—each bonbon, macaroon, and petit four. There was a separate column for SOAP—a fresh bar every morning: lavender, verbena, coconut, chamomile, rosemary. Auntie had overlooked the sliver of brown floor soap pried from the bottom of a bucket. BUBBLEBATH shared a column with SHAMPOO. RIBBONS included bows, barrettes, combs, tiaras. There were columns for SILK & SATIN, UNDIES, DOLLS & TEDDY BEARS—and a figure beside each item for what Auntie was owed. Each page concluded with an updated tabulation plus the usurious interest on the ever-larger reimbursement Auntie expected when the settlement came in.

The Girl stood at the end of the corridor of locked doors, before the full-length mirror framed in black like a sympathy card. Through a fog of dust a girl in a moth-eaten sweater who lived on prunes, stale oyster crackers, and a faint snowfall of Kraft’s Parmesan stared blankly back, her hair unwashed for weeks, bangs trimmed with a serrated bread knife that likely had been used to butcher liver. As usual, the Girl’s own gaunt twin seemed in no mood to commune. Somewhere a toilet flushed. The water in the old house gasped out gritty with rust and too cold to bathe in.

The first time the Girl heard the mewing she became alarmed that, unbeknownst to Auntie, one of the roomers had abandoned a kitten. Then it was a puppy whining, and then a chattering that caused her to wonder if the hurdy-gurdy man had left without his monkey. She proceeded door by door along the corridor, and heard a parakeet repeating what presumably was his name: “Fine Feather, Fine Feather.” The puppy’s whines intensified into the sparking squeal of a grindstone honing shears. She paused to twirl to a tarantella freshly cranked from an ancient barrel organ. That wooden clacking from behind the blue door—the only painted one—was, she supposed, the ventriloquist’s abandoned dummy silently singing.

Empty rooms? Once the creak of her footfalls was recognizable to whomever was listening, each afternoon seemed increasingly occupied. The puppy’s whine became the whinny of a pony—a Shetland, like the pony she suddenly recalled having mounted to have her photo snapped at a carnival on a day she fell in love with horses. The whinny dissolved into the whistle of a kettle on a hot plate, or was it a violin reduced to a single string? The tapping of an old typewriter reminded her of Blind Pew’s cane in Treasure Island , which in turn allowed her to remember that as a child she’d been read to at bedtime. Like every reminiscence here, it seemed less a memory than a déjà vu. She heard whispers, heavy breathing, sighs, doorknobs rattling, the thump of hooves, but the doors held fast, locked from without, and Auntie slept with the keys. The Girl heard the Old Spice jingle whistled to the scrape of a straight razor, and stooped to the keyhole to inhale a scent of aftershave. She remembered her father.

Auntie found her by the bay windows. On a pane fogged by the steam of her breath, the Girl had traced the face of the retreating moon. Two slick finger marks ran from its crater eyes.

“Oh, my, look at the moon,” Auntie said. “But better to cry real tears, my dear. Let it out rather than this apathetic moping. Not that there’s one way to grieve, any more than one way to love. They’re shape-shifters, love and grief, aren’t they, and they have many disguises. Yet one thing’s sure, your mother wants you to be happy. How does Auntie know, you ask?”

The Girl had not asked.

“Because, my dear, if there’s a bond even stronger than that between mother and daughter, it’s the connection between identical twins. You’ve heard of twin telepathy? I assure you it crosses space, time, and the border of life itself. I sense your mother’s presence as if it’s my own, and she wants you to grow into a woman—beautiful, confident, and free. That’s the shape my grief assumes—hope for your future.”