The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

Eighty miles in just half a day. Electric wires webbed the skies of New York City, strung overhead like the work of massive spiders, wires that came loose from their wooden poles to spark fires in the streets and roast a little boy unlucky enough to grab the living cord. In New York, Mrs. Vanderbilt dressed for a ball in a gold and silver electrified gown and called herself “The Electric Light.”

      In the South Pacific, a volcano rained black smoke onto a place called Krakatoa. In America, the men who ran the railroad companies were getting together to decide how people told time. They sliced the nation into zones from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Six o’clock in the morning in Georgia would be three o’clock in California. Time and distance folded like paper.

      I wanted to leave our close hills, but where would I go? If I had all day, I could walk into town, but I couldn’t picture myself telling the clerk the name of a city, buying a train ticket, and handing over money I didn’t have. How would I decide if I should go to New York City or Atlanta? I could choose a closer place, like Rome, Georgia, or Chattanooga, Tennessee, but I had no answer to what I would do when I got there. School, church, the barn, and the field were where I belonged, even less for Leo. We had a sister, too, but she was under a stone, born, baptized, and buried in a day. There was nothing here for any of us, and yet here we stayed.

      Imagining myself out in the world meant leaving Leo. That thought made me want to wrap my arms tight around our square white house with its peeling white paint. Momma said that no one with any class should act like they were someone’s renter, but the house wasn’t ours. We leased it and worked the land for the family of the man who had built the place fifty years before. The oldest members of his family were gone to the beyond, the newest ones gone somewhere else earthly. Those hills and the land we worked kept me hemmed in during the winter when I ran with the kitchen bucket to the cistern, my coat over my shoulders, sleep gritty in my eyes. No matter how cold I was, I always stopped to watch the hills, gray-green and speckled with snow, crows drifting across the silver sky. In summer, I watched the hills through the wavering heat of the afternoon, perspiration holding my dress tight to my skin.

      If I left, I wouldn’t have to hear one person say I looked like a possum in a dress, the way I’d overhead a fellow remark at the post office. He’d looked me up and down when he thought I wasn’t aware. If I left, no one would whisper behind their hands when I came into the schoolroom, calling me a tall tree. Captivating a person, not a fox, would make a moment when no one could shame me. So, on a Sunday, when Mr. Campbell pointed his finger at me for Sunday School recitation, I tried it.

      “The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright: but the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness,” I said.

      Behind me, Early Trumball belched, then whispered, “Excuse me.”

      “Train up a child in the way he should go,” I continued.

      Calling out a miscreant with choice Bible words had entertainment value, and I hoped Early got the message. As I spoke, I lowered my eyelids, filtering the daylight into a warm blur that let me focus on soft, round Mr. Campbell at the front of the room. Half-lidded, I brought him into bright relief, and then concentrated only on his eyes. My recitation grew distant in my ears, replaced by the thrumming of my blood coursing through my body. I kept my gaze locked to Mr. Campbell’s until it was clear to me that a nearly empty room was behind his eyes. A room inhabited only by me.

      At the last line of my recitation, I cut my gaze away to the windowsill, and let him go.

      Mr. Campbell staggered, knocking a piece of chalk to the floor. As he ducked to fetch it, the back of my neck crawled. My head swam, and I sat without him telling me to. I nearly missed my seat, landing half on and half off as I went down too hard. Even though the stove was not lit, my collar and the backs of my knees were uncomfortably damp.

      THE FIRST TIME I WENT alone to my father’s study was the next Saturday afternoon. He had books that Momma wouldn’t have in the parlor, books with stories about somewhere not here.

      “Nothing a lady would choose to spend her time with,” she said. No copies of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine or the Cedartown Appeal, or a novel like The Victories of Love. She found his books dull. Almanacs. Shakespeare. Histories of the Ancient World.

      Momma had gone with Daddy to town. I convinced Leo that he wanted a rest, and after he lay on the divan I hemmed him in with a blanket and busied him with his wooden soldier. I promised myself ten minutes with my father’s books. That number that seemed right before a neighbor or a tradesman happened by of a Saturday afternoon and noticed through the window an unattended boy, an absent girl. I arranged a line of chairs around the divan to protect my brother like a cage.

      Undoing my boots so my footfalls wouldn’t distract Leo from his toy, I crept away, thrilled by my planning. At the study door, I turned the handle quickly, and slipped into the room. The door hinges didn’t squeal, the frame didn’t scrape—a grant of permission, at least from the room itself. The single window streamed a burst of sunlight onto the bookshelves. My father arranged his books tall to short. His ledgers squared to the far edge of his desk calmed my racing heart. In this room, all was as it should be, perfect and controlled. I wondered what my father believed when he watched the field and the fringe of trees from here. Did he pretend, like I did, that we owned it all? His presence clung to the air, a scent like sour teeth and flatiron starch. Five years had passed since he had asked me to help with his accounts for the church or the store, me reading numbers back to him as he flicked his pencil tip against the pages of a ledger. When I had been very small, I drew pictures in the empty spots in those almanacs and histories, happy in his company.

      I hadn’t helped him count since the day Leo fell.

      I listened for Leo’s conversation with his soldier. Even the distance of two rooms between us was a laxity on my part. No cry of frustration from dropping the man to the floor, out of reach and out of balance, no shouts of glee as the soldier fought a blanket or a weak fist.

      The books, spines out, seemed to have their backs turned to me, but those books who didn’t want my company would be the ones to tell me what a train ticket looked like and how a person chose a destination. If that person’s brother wasn’t imperfect. If she wasn’t a person who kept silent about the day she dropped him, the day he hit his head. Leo, in the parlor, was silent. He might have fallen asleep, solider in hand.

      Turning out the Bulfinch, the Shakespeare, an almanac or two, I came to a book with a red leather cover. Involuntarily, I pushed my thighs together as if my body had made that color. The book’s title was The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Below that, in somber black letters, the author’s name. Henrietta Wolf. A book by a lady writer. Surely a novel, but why tucked away here I couldn’t fathom. Momma likely hadn’t read this one. I would beat her to it.

      To my dear reader—the first chapter began. Being the dear reader, I rested for the moment in my father’s chair.

       I am capable of affording testimony. The atmosphere around my head was not like smoke, nor fog, but a kind of sunrise or glare directed only at me.

      I thought of how the sunlight over the sidewalks in town made my eyes hurt when I was a little girl. Like me, this author suffered under a glare that no one else saw.

      I turned a page.

      She wrote of curing blindness in an elderly woman, of hearing words articulated clearly before the speaker had opened his mouth, of being overcome by a heat wave in a chilly room. Like me, devastated by a wilting heat after I’d captivated Mr. Campbell.

      Cautioning myself to be gentle with the brittle paper, I turned page after page, devouring her words like a meal.

      She had been imprisoned by aloneness. So had I. Her empathy moved me to tears. Sufferers are many, she wrote.

      In the parlor, Leo was searching for me. As if I were at his side, I saw him elbow himself up from the pillow, and crane his neck to find me in the doorway. His come get me rustled in my ears. I’ll be right there formed in my mind and flew toward him.

      I needed to know if Henrietta Wolf had stilled a wild