Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders Read Free

of the seventh book—to crazies?
    This year, the year of the new millennium, the society invited me to a special gala at their annual conference, celebrating “One Hundred Years of Harriet Wolf.” I despise the way they love my mother. Sometimes they nearly convince me that I’ve missed something magnetically lovable in her—something only visible from afar to strangers. A farsighted love.
    But heaven knows I’m also thankful. My mother took me in with the girls after George abandoned us, and those books still produce royalty checks that keep us afloat—and I do surely squirrel money away.
    “Bloomed,” Opal whispers softly now. “‘Doomed’ and ‘blessed’ equals ‘bloomed.’ How does that line go?”
    She’s referring to a conversation in a canoe between Daisy and Weldon, a moment that so many people have considered the most important in my mother’s books. “I haven’t memorized the collected works of Harriet Wolf!” I say sharply. “I’ve had a life of my own to live!”
    “Oh,” Opal says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
    “No one ever means to! ” I say, and then I shout, “Please close the curtain!”
    And there’s her face again, a half-pining, half-pinched expression. Then her thick arm reaches out and gives the curtain a sharp yank, and she’s gone.
    I close my eyes, feel the press of darkness—gravity pinning me tightly to the bed. The thrumming of machines is like small panting breaths. I can’t help but think of Tilton, so easily breathless. Is she alone in the house? Or has she made her way next door to Mrs. Gottleib’s? I do not trust Mrs. Got tleib, who promised years ago to help in times of need, but what choice do I have?
    Tilton was a peaked little girl with fine white hair that wisped down over her ears. She is still a pale, wheezy-chested asthmatic who bruises easily and is prone to allergies, dizzy spells, shortsightedness, car sickness, and mysterious fevers. I prided myself on diagnosing her lactose intolerance before ever hearing the term. She’s so sensitive to the sun. I kept her coated in lotion as a child so that all summer she seemed to shine like she’d been freshly lacquered. I protected her from her food allergies—nuts, strawberries. She’s prone to hives. If she’s stung by an insect—not even a bee, mind you—her skin bloats around the bite and is tender to the touch. The mosquitoes love her. In addition to the lotion, I had to add bug-repellent spray—which gave her skin the feel of a thin, brittle exoskeleton. It got so it was easier to keep her on screened-in porches when she needed airing.
    And then there’s her mind, a strange and distant world beyond anyone’s grasp. She isn’t interested in anything whole. The world is made of small parts of machinery—flowers, birds, toaster ovens.
    Despite all of her weaknesses and needs—and, moreover, because of them—I love her mightily.
    We all have our own weaknesses, needs, and tragedies, thank you very much, so Opal Harper can keep hers! I bear the stony tragedy of my childhood—the blank stare of fatherlessness. It wasn’t called a tragedy because my mother refused to talk about my father, who had to have existed at some point. And so I could never claim the tragedy for what it was.
    I vowed not to let that silence happen to my own daughters. When our tragedy struck, I seized it. I turned it into a bedtime story, our sole bedtime story, one I’ve told so many times over the years that it’s taken on the feeling of something more marbled—its own monument. I told my daughters, “Human beings are shaped by tragedy and this one’s ours.”
    And, just like that, the story lights my mind as if winding through a projector in a dark room. Without the words themselves to control the story, it begins to lose all sense of myth. I can feel it detaching, fluttering up wildly. Memory is nearly impossible to contain. There is the lit cigar, the plane engine steaming in the road, the suitcase