The Lace Reader. Brunonia Barry
and besides, she had been blessed with a matching set.
And my Great-Aunt Eva, who is more mother to me than May ever has been, is equally strange. Running her own business well into her eighties, Eva is renowned as both Boston Brahmin and Salem witch when, really, she is neither. Actually, Eva is an old-school Unitarian with Transcendentalist tendencies. She quotes Scripture in the same breath as she quotes Emerson and Thoreau. Yet in recent years Eva has spoken only in clichés, as if use of the tired metaphor can somehow remove her from the inevitable outcomes she is paid to predict.
For thirty-five years of her life, Eva has run a ladies’ tearoom and franchised successful etiquette classes to the wealthy children of Boston’s North Shore. But what Eva will be remembered for is her uncanny ability to read lace. People come from all over the world to be read by Eva, and she can tell your past, present, and future pretty accurately just by holding the lace in front of you and squinting her eyes.
In one form or another, all the Whitney women are readers. My twin sister, Lyndley, said she couldn’t read lace, but I never believed her. The last time we tried, she saw the same thing I saw in the pattern, and what we saw that night led her to the choices that eventually killed her. When Lyndley died, I resolved never to look at a piece of lace again.
This is one of the only things Eva and I have ever vehemently disagreed about. “It wasn’t that the lace was wrong,” she always insisted. “It was the reader’s interpretation that failed.” I know that’s supposed to make me feel better. Eva never says anything to intentionally hurt. But Lyndley and I interpreted the lace the same way that night, and though our choices might have been different, nothing that Eva says can ever bring my sister back.
After Lyndley’s death, I had to get out of Salem and ended up in California, which was as far as I could go without falling off the end of the earth. I know that Eva wants me to come home to Salem. It’s for my own good, she says. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
Just recently, when I had my hysterectomy, Eva sent me her lace pillow, the one she uses to make the lace. It was delivered to the hospital.
“What is it?” my nurse asked, holding it up, staring at the bobbins and the piece of lace, a work in progress, still attached to it. “Some kind of pillow?”
“It’s a lace maker’s pillow,” I said. “For making Ipswich lace.”
She regarded me blankly. I could tell she had no idea what to say. It didn’t look like any pillow she had ever seen. And what the hell was Ipswich lace?
“Try holding it against your sutures if you have to cough or sneeze,” she finally said. “That’s what we use pillows for around here.”
I felt around until I found the secret pocket hidden in the pillow. I slipped my fingers in, looking for a note. Nothing.
I know that Eva hopes I will start reading lace again. She believes that lace reading is a God-given gift, and that we are required to honor such gifts.
I imagine the note she might have written: “Of those to whom much is given, much is expected—Luke 12:48.” She used to quote that bit of Scripture as proof.
I can read lace, and I can read minds, though it isn’t something I try to do; it is something that just happens sometimes. My mother can do both, but over the years May has become a practical woman who believes that knowing what is in people’s minds or their futures is not always in anyone’s best interest. This is probably the only point upon which my mother and I have ever agreed.
When I left the hospital, I stole the pillowcase off one of their pillows. The Hollywood Presbyterian label was double stamped on both sides. I stuffed Eva’s lace pillow inside, hiding the threads, the lace, and the bonelike bobbins that were swinging like tiny Poe pendulums.
If there was a future for me, and I was not altogether certain there was, I wasn’t going to risk reading it in the lace.
Each Reader must choose a piece of lace. It is hers for life. It might be a pattern handed down through the generations or a piece chosen by the Reader for its beauty and familiarity. Many Readers prefer the handmade laces, particularly those of old Ipswich or the laces made today by the women of Yellow Dog Island.
—THE LACE READER’S GUIDE
WHEN THE PHONE CALL COMES IN, I am dreaming of water. Not the warm blues and greens of the California beach towns where I live now, but the dark New England Atlantic of my youth. In my dream I am swimming to the moon. Like all dreams, it seems logical. The idea that there is no pathway between sea and moon never occurs.
I swim my own combination: part breaststroke, part drownproofing: slow and purposeful, a rhythm remembered from another lifetime. The movement is all efficiency, with just nose, ears, and eyes protruding above the water, mouth submerged. With each forward stroke, tiny waves of salt enter my open mouth, then recede again as I slow, mirroring the larger surrounding ocean.
I swim for a long time. Past Salem Harbor and the swells. Past any sight of land at all. I swim until the sea becomes still and clear, too calm to be any real ocean. The light from the full dream-moon etches a clear path on the black water, a road to follow. There is no sound save my own breath, slow and steady as I swim.
This was once my sister’s dream. Now it is only mine.
The rhythm of movement gives way to a sound rhythm as the telephone rings again and then again. This is one of the only phones that actually rings anymore, and part of the reason I agreed to take this house-sitting job. It is the kind of phone we might have had on our island. That’s the one interesting thing about what has happened to me. I am encouraged to rewrite my own history. In the history I am writing, May actually has a phone.
My therapist, Dr. Fukuhara, is a Jungian. She believes in symbols and shadows. As do I. But my therapy has stopped for the time being. We have come to an impasse, was the way Dr. Fukuhara put it. I laughed when she said it. Not because it was funny but because it was the kind of cliché that my Aunt Eva would use.
On the fourth ring, the answering machine picks up. The machine is old also, not as old as the phone, but the kind where you can screen calls and hear a little bit of the message before you decide whether it’s worth it to actually speak to a live person.
My brother’s voice sounds tinny and too loud.
I stretch to pick up, pulling the surgery stitches that are still inside me, the ones that haven’t yet dissolved.
“What?” I say.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” Beezer says.
I remember falling asleep on this couch last night, too tired to get up, hypnotized by the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sound of Santana playing over the hill at the Greek.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I wouldn’t have called you, but…”
“But May’s in trouble again.” It’s the only time Beezer ever calls these days. At last count, May has been arrested six times in her efforts to help abuse victims. Recently my brother informed me that he’d put the number of the local bail bondsman on his speed dial.
“It’s not May,” he says.
My throat tightens.
“It’s Eva.”
Dead, I’m thinking. Oh, my God, Eva is dead.
“She’s missing, Towner.”
Missing. The word has no meaning. “Missing” is the last word I expected to hear.
Palm fronds clatter against the open window. It’s already way too hot. Clear Santa Ana sky, earthquake weather. I reach up to pull the window shut. The cat runs scratches across my legs as it lunges for the