Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders Read Free Page A

handle on the ground. Even with the medications to lull my heart, my chest lurches, but my mind soldiers on.
    I see myself as a young mother with large stiff brown hair and oversized glasses, sitting in the middle of the backseat, balancing on my knees the casserole dish, weighted with leftovers from a potluck dinner. The dinner was in Elkton, Maryland, one town away from where we lived in Newark, Delaware. The road connecting the two small towns was straight and flat. On one side of me, Tilton—baby Tilton—was strapped into a homemade car seat, a kind of crib with bars that I’d double-padded by hand. And Ruthie, a seven-year-old, was buckled on the other side of me, wearing George’s old football helmet, with extra padding to make it fit in case of an accident, when she might strike her head against the door or window.
    George, behind the wheel, sat alone in the front seat. He’d cracked the window, at my urging, and was blowing his cigar smoke into the cold rainy night air when Ruthie’s voice rose up like a kettle whistle, inconsolable.
    “It’s that helmet,” George shouted. He hated the helmet. He felt that I smothered the children, in general. Was he jealous? When we were dating, had I doted on him too much? Maybe the shift after Ruthie’s birth was too jarring. The cigar, just a nub now, was crammed into one corner of his mouth, so George shouted from the other corner. “I can’t take that kid’s noise!”
    The chill draft was putting Tilton’s frail respiratory system at risk. I fit my hand through the crib bars and pulled the blanket up to her small knob of a chin. “Ruthie isn’t crying about the helmet,” I said. “She’s crying about the cigar smoke! It stunts the lungs of small children!” It was pollution, clearly, each smoker a factory. I tried to reason with Ruthie, shouting over her sharp-pitched cry, “What if we wrecked, Ruthie? And you cracked your head open on the window and died? You don’t want that, do you?”
    Ruthie quieted and then, always contrary, she nodded, the oversized helmet jostling on her head. “Yes!” she screamed. She would prefer to die. She glared at me—her eyes hooded by her thick bangs—and then arched in her seat and cried louder.
    There was nothing I could do. She was a fretful soul, a born bully who, from birth, tried to make me her first victim. I had to watch her every time I said no, because she would run to the bathroom and pee on the pink mats next to the commode. She was George’s child. The two of them would do me in—I could feel it. And what did I want? Only to protect my family from the world’s dangers, to keep them out of the view of death’s greedy watchful eye.
    “Isn’t that cigar smoked out yet?” I shouted.
    George pinched it between his fingers and flicked it out the window. “There! Happy? Is someone in this car happy?”
    Tilton was happy, I thought. Tilton was always happy with me. Her cry was only a little whimpery thing that was easily extinguished. I remember the soft tissue of her ears, so fine and thinly veined, how they perched like pink gargoyles on either side of her head, how they glowed when lit from behind, and the crusty spots on her scalp that I oiled up and picked off. Tilton, toothless, grinning—she loved me, unconditionally. I was unaccustomed to it. It wasn’t that my mother didn’t love me unconditionally. She did. But it was sometimes as if my mother was searching me for something—an unnameable trait—that I simply did not possess. My mother loved me despite something. I could never figure out what, exactly.
    The evening had been defeating. I could smell the acrid tang of sour cream and onion soup mix from the spinach casserole on my lap. Why had everyone just picked at mine politely? Because they didn’t like me. I was sure of it. Women punish one another this way—expressing disdain via casseroles. I’ve never quite gotten along in chummy groups like that. I wanted to exchange information on