The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

to leave The Truth of Mesmeric Influence behind. Henrietta Wolf knew me deeply. We were dear friends already, and I had read only a few of her pages. She understood suffering and silence, and her words were a gentle hand over mine. I know you, they said. Stay with me and I will show you who you are. I pushed the Bulfinch and the almanacs together to cover the empty space where the book had been. Lightfooted and light of heart, I hurried to my brother’s side, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence a prize against my ribs.

      That night, I carried my lamp to my bedroom and unwound the book from the cocoon where I’d hidden it inside a woolen scarf in my bureau. Freed at my table, Mrs. Wolf described how Aaron in the Bible used hypnotism to turn a rod into a serpent. She hadn’t seen it herself, but she knew how it was done. A behavior of stillness and rest is effected by the transference of human energy, she wrote. So much knowledge accumulates every day that not a single book can hold the whole truth. In a month, in a year, what will the genuine practitioners learn and share with their dearest ones? The Mesmerist’s mystery exerts a force over his subject.

      When Leo followed my hand after his fever broke, he was able to do so because I had captivated him with my human energy. Mrs. Wolf described back to me what I could do and what she could do, and she called herself a Mesmerist.

      There was so much more to learn. Had I known everything she could do—that I could someday do, too—on the day that he watched my hand, I might have cured him right then.

       The whole body may be filled with a churning magnetism that reciprocates the gift of human energy.

      That swirling in me was why I had to poke holes in my poor ruined mattress. I was filled with magnetism that I had to release. Every time I worked a pin into the underside of a finger, I wouldn’t breathe—I couldn’t—until I’d broken the skin without raising blood. That tiny disturbance of sharp metal into dull flesh was a relief, a victory. Blood would have been a failure, proof that I was merely human, clumsy and made of shame. Magnetism stirred in me, seeking exit.

      At first, I had worked the pin into the pad of my finger, but I’d learned that moving it across the narrow column of fat at the place where the joint met the palm was better. This hurt less and left no tiny torn piece on the tip of my finger, a defect signaling weakness. The sight of that silver pin, so sharp and bright at the tip showing blurred and yellow-pink inside my own skin calmed what I had no name for until Mrs. Wolf named the feeling. Magnetism. Human energy.

      When I was done, I eased the pin out as intently as I’d put it in, watching that I didn’t break the skin but for the entry and exit points. I rendered the pin innocent by wiping the metal against my dress and returning the tool to the sewing box from where I’d taken it.

      No one knew this, of course. Not even Leo.

      One more day, I told myself. One more day and I’ll put Mrs. Wolf’s book back on the shelf. One more day before Daddy notices a gap in the height of his books, before he looks for a red cover that couldn’t belong to the father I knew. While I read, I slid the point of a glass-topped hairpin through a waxy callous at the base of my left ring finger. There was no need to watch.

      A WEEK PASSED. Even though we were well into autumn, the air hung summer-heavy. I sat by the kitchen door hoping for a breeze, peeling potatoes, tossing the skins into a bucket, and dropping the exposed white lumps into a bowl in my lap. The glare of hot weather had begun to hurt my eyes. Thunder in the distance meant relief.

      I knew I couldn’t captivate my cousin Dale. She never would look straight at me.

      Dale attended the same girls’ academy in Tennessee that our mothers had. They were sisters, and until they’d married, did everything together. Like them, Dale studied Shakespeare, Scripture, homemaking, and Latin. She sang in an unstable soprano that sounded like a bucket being pried from ice. And as often as possible, Momma invited her to visit.

      “She’s the kind of young lady we don’t see enough of lately,” Momma told me every time she sent an invitation.

      Everything I did, I did better than right. Counting the stitches as I sewed a hem, I made twenty-four, twenty-six, then twenty-eight, each exactly the same. Always evens, too. No stopping at an odd number ending in a seven or a nine or a one. Even numbers and balanced sets tended to keep me from wanting to jump out of my skin. Same with movement: even numbers. Churning butter was a task where Momma’s “be gentle” didn’t apply. I counted to myself in twos, fours, eights. Collect the eggs, sweep the house, do my schoolwork when I had it. Tell stories aloud to myself and Leo when I didn’t.

      When I did, Daddy told me to hush up. He read the newspaper aloud to Momma, who could read, of course, but liked to hear Daddy while she did her needlepoint in the evening. I sat on the piano bench and spoke quietly to myself about horses who could dance and boys and girls who sailed across the ocean on a slice of toast.

      “Listen to your Daddy,” Momma told me. She didn’t look up from her green thread. She was making a parrot in a jungle.

      My story kept on inside my head.

      “Quit moving your mouth like that with no sound,” Daddy said. The Appeal was in front of his face, but he could see me.

      Tell me the story again, Leo said, inside my head.

      The last time Dale was here, she twittered at Leo. I wanted to slap her for aiming a laugh like that at such a little boy, and her without the sense to see that Leo wasn’t right. Dale dropped fussy French phrases into the most average conversation. She wasn’t right either, talking in a language none of us but my mother understood.

      Momma had sent Dale and me into the woods to pick scuppernongs. Away from my mother’s judgmental eye, I plucked the green grapes from their vines. The fullest grapes radiated pressure from within, like skin swollen by a spider bite.

      “Dale, look, a grape like a swolled-up finger,” I said, presenting her with a fat grape.

      As I expected, she recoiled, which prompted me to bite down on the swollen-fleshed grape, squirting green muck and pale brown seeds in her direction. The grape’s skin was sour and unpleasantly slippery inside, with rough scabs on the outside, but she didn’t need to know that. The mess didn’t touch her—I hadn’t intended that it would—but fell onto the dirt, no bigger than a bird dropping. Dale curled her lip.

      “Mmm,” I said, possessing my field, my grape vines, my peeling house. “Just like popping a good blister.”

      Dale’s shriek didn’t gratify me the way I’d hoped it would.

      While Dale approached us on a train from Tennessee, I waved flies from potatoes and worried that she’d find my book wrapped in a scarf atop my wardrobe. My paring knife skipped and peeled a strip from my thumb.

      Sure enough, when Dale made herself at home in the chair beside my bed, she settled her too-many clothes into left- and right-hand stacks, smoothing the tissue paper between each fold. I didn’t own five dresses to wrap in paper. She kept a broad-brimmed straw hat in a patterned hatbox, and I was certain I’d heard her whisper ‘goodnight’ to the hat the last time she visited. I’d have wished the hat sweet dreams too if it were mine, the way it complemented her petal-white skin and sat just right against her hair. Her hair was black as mine, but smooth and shiny as a crow’s wing.

      I helped her unwrap three dresses from their paper, but the heavy weather made my head throb. I wanted to unbutton my dress and walk around in my cotton chemise and stocking feet, stomping like the dray horse I was, just to annoy someone. Her. Me. The sky drooped like soiled diapers. Faced with a week in Dale’s company, I tossed out a story.

      “The last time the weather felt like this, we had nuts from the hickory tree in the yard come flying in the front room,” I told her. This wasn’t a complete lie. There had been a rainstorm and strong winds. When the front door blew open, nuts scattered off the tree and rolled into the house.

      Dale picked strands of her hair from a brush and made the not-listening listening sound. “Mmm-hmm.”

      I flung myself wide across