The Lace Reader. Brunonia Barry
acknowledge that she’s incredibly intuitive, which I would argue is almost the same thing. So either she is still angry about the witches, which I don’t understand at all, or she is angry at me for reading the minister. In any case, her anger is palpable. Even he can feel it.
“What do you think?” Dr. Ward is waiting for an answer.
“You already know what I think,” May says. “I don’t think we should have a funeral at all.”
“I think Eva would have wanted some kind of a ceremony,” Dr. Ward says.
“A ceremony would be nice.” These are the first words that Auntie Emma has spoken.
“Eva was quite religious, you know,” Dr. Ward offers.
“Eva? Religious?” May laughs out loud.
Although I’d rather side with Dr. Ward than May any day, even I have to agree with my mother on this one. Eva was a church member, but she wasn’t what anyone would call religious. In the summertime she did the flowers for the First Church. And she could debate Scripture with the best of them. But she seldom attended services. She told me once that her idea of spirituality was working outside in her garden or swimming.
“Well, I think she would have wanted something,” Dr. Ward says. His voice has a bit of an edge to it, which he quickly hides under a forced smile.
“Then I think you should be the one to do the planning,” May says, and walks out. And now I’m angry, because this is just like May, to leave us all sitting here this way. My mother has been known to hold off the county sheriff, the Salem police, and a dozen aggressive reporters all at the same time. She can run a thriving business or give a great interview to Newsweek, but when it comes to family, she can’t handle anything.
“I don’t know why anyone is even asking her opinion.” I say a bit too harshly. “I’ll bet you ten to one she won’t even show up for the funeral if we do have one.”
“You showed up, didn’t you?” Beezer’s voice also has an edge. He quickly feels guilty. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but can we please not do this?”
“Sorry,” I say, and mean it.
“Maybe we should just have it at the Unitarian church as planned,” Dr. Ward says. “On a first-come, first-served basis.”
I am picturing a deli counter where everyone takes a number. I keep the image to myself.
There is a long silence.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Ward finally asks me.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, not knowing what else to say.
“We’re all sorry,” Dr. Ward says, his eyes tearing up just a little. He reaches out a ministerial hand to touch my arm, but the tears have thrown his vision off, and his hand grasps at empty air.
Later, when they think they’re alone in the house, I hear Anya talking to Beezer. “You have the strangest family,” she says. She means it affectionately; it’s supposed to be a little joke.
I know his expression without seeing his face. He doesn’t smile.
When I was in the bin, after Lyndley killed herself, I signed myself up for shock therapy. It was against Eva’s wishes and certainly against May’s (which was part of the reason I did it), but the doctors recommended it highly. I’d been in the hospital for six months. They’d tried all the standard drugs for depression, though this was pre-Prozac, so the drugs they had to work with weren’t all that effective. Plus, they put me on an antipsychotic for the hallucinations. I was on so much Stelazine that I couldn’t swallow. I could barely speak. And the medication didn’t help that much. My waking images were still of Lyndley posed on the rocks, leaning into the wind like the figurehead on an old sailing ship, ready to jump. My night terrors pictured Lyndley’s father, Cal Boynton, being ripped apart by dogs. I had begun by this time to realize that this last image was hallucination, though when I’d been admitted, I actually believed that the dogs had ripped Cal apart, that he was dead. The doctors called it some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Well, Cal wasn’t dead, but Lyndley was. And no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get either image out of my mind. I thought, and the doctors told me, that they could finally rid me of the image with shock therapy, so I signed up. I was almost eager for it. May’s response to this new development was to send me a copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. She didn’t bring it, mind you; she never once came herself to see me at the hospital. Instead she sent the book in with Eva, who had instructions to read it aloud to me if necessary.
“I’m doing this,” was all I said to Eva.
It wasn’t horrible; at least my experience of it was not. And it worked. It took several treatments, but eventually the images began to recede. The image of Cal went back to being a nightmare, one I could often wake myself from before things got really ugly. And although the image of Lyndley didn’t go away completely, it shrank down to the size of a little black box that stayed fixed in the left-hand corner of my peripheral vision. It’s not that it was gone, exactly; it’s just that I didn’t have to look at it directly anymore. I could look at something else if I chose to, and I did.
For the first time I could remember, I had a plan. I was going to move out to California. Since I had already applied to and been accepted at UCLA, I told the hospital that I was going to go to college as originally planned. The doctors were delighted. They took it as a sign that I was cured, that their new and improved electronic medicine had worked on me.
Before I’d had the shock therapy, in a final attempt to talk me out of it, Eva had said something strange. She wasn’t upset by my visions. In her profession as reader, visions were what you wished for. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not the visions that are wrong, but the interpretation of those visions. Sometimes it’s not possible to understand the images until you gain some perspective.” She was advocating more talk therapy and no shocks—at least that’s what I thought at the time. What she really meant, and what she told me years later, was that she had seen the same images herself. She had seen both images in the lace, the one of Lyndley and the one of the dogs. But she had seen them as symbols, while I saw them as real.
“I blame myself,” Eva said, already starting to speak in clichés. “I should have known.”
We all find means of anesthesia.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Eva told me with a sad smile.
The shock therapy took away most of my short-term memory. It hasn’t come back. I remember very little of what happened that summer. Which is probably just as well—it’s what I signed up for. What it also did—what is really unusual, one in a thousand statistically—is that it took away a lot of my long-term memory, too. They assured me that it would come back, and much of it has. Unlike most people, who lose memory over the years, I remember more as time passes. It usually comes back in fragments, sometimes in whole stories. I wrote some of them down when I was at the hospital, but by the time I got to UCLA, I had run out. I didn’t last past the first semester. I told Eva I was dropping out because of the Stelazine, that I had double vision and couldn’t read, which was true. I took my first house-sitting job for a film director, and he got me a job reading scripts, first for him and later for one of the studios.
For a while Eva tried to talk me into going back to UCLA. Or into coming back and going to school in Boston.
Today the women of the Circle create their bobbins from the bones of the birds that once lived on Yellow Dog Island. The lightness of these bones makes the thread tension uneven, and it is this, more than anything else, that gives this new Ipswich lace its unusual quality and lovely irregular texture and makes it so easy to read.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE