Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [52]
None of it is real, I kept telling myself, staring at the outline of a smokestack outside my window. Only this is real, here and now. I clutched my body, imagined that spinning, gleaming girl above everyone, slicing the air right open.
The next morning I rose, showered quickly in the small bathroom, and walked across the street. I was determined not to think about anything but the task in front of me.
“Where can I apply for a job?” I asked a tired-looking woman carrying a smock. She pointed. A sign led to “Applications.” The place was desperate for bodies, it seemed, and within an hour a foreman was handing me a smock and a time sheet and putting me to work sewing school uniforms.
I was given my own little station, a chair with a spindly black sewing machine in front of it. I looked around at the other girls, but they all kept on working, their faces bent to the fabric. At first I had difficulty placing the fabric in the right spot, getting the machine to move the way it was supposed to, but by the end of the day I’d gotten it down well enough to keep my job, even if my hands were stuck through with pinpricks and bleeding. That night I went back to the boardinghouse, ate a bowl of soup and a hunk of cheese with Esther in silence, and fell into bed, dreamlessly.
After several more days I got used to the way the sewing machines clattered like teeth, the feel of the needles jabbing me when I made a mistake. I settled into a routine so dull it seemed to wipe out everything, both my past and my future. Every day I picked up the gray wool vests that prickled under my hands while one hundred girls did the same thing on either side of me, lined up in rows. Time stretched out in a way it never had before, until a minute seemed like an hour and an hour a whole day. My head pounded with the whirring of the machines, which strung vest after vest and skirt after skirt with the same dull thread. I returned to my room so wiped out that I did not even think about the circus or the trapeze, just the bliss of darkness and sleep.
But it was at night that everything returned to me, and I dreamt of Mary floating on the river, her hair coiled blackly and wetly against her forehead and throat, wrapping itself around her neck like ropes; of the opal that was all light, a million points of light contained in one small, swirling face glowing from her breast; of the letters and photographs she had left strewn across the library’s wooden floor, the papers she had let pile by the front door; of the leaves that had clutched her skin, the thin, narrow leaves of the tree weeping over her; and of her cat’s eyes opening under the water.
Sometimes I dreamt that the river was pressing down on me, too, pushing me to the bottom, where plants and reeds encircled me and my lungs slowly filled with water. I gulped the air, tried to remember how to breathe when I woke up. I cried so many tears into my pillow that I could not believe that my tiny body hadn’t shriveled into a dry husk. And for those moments the world was dark and hollow, inside out, until I rose from the bed, covered myself with a smock, and stuck my head under the rusted bathroom faucet. The dreams vanished like mist then. Outside my window, there was only concrete and steel.
On Sundays, my day off, I took to wandering the streets, hoping to spot some sign of the circus—some dash of color in the gray winter landscape—but there was nothing. The smoke covered my clothes with its scent and its weight. The feel of piles of buttons under my fingertips stayed with me even as I wandered the streets or lay on my bed in my room, staring at the ceiling. For weeks I couldn’t bring myself to think about the trapeze, and a heavy guilt settled over me, burying me in my new life. My only pleasure