A woman who I thought was very beautiful used to steal glass
bottles from dumpsters. Sometimes in the early morning, I would hear her
rustling below my window. She liked to line up the bottles on the rim of the
dumpster and inspect them, tilting them as they gleamed in the ripening pink
light. Then the last one would drop into her bag with a dainty clink, and she
would be gone.
Sometimes
when it seemed like no one was looking, I would peer into the dumpster. I
learned to climb up the side without getting my tights dirty. She always left
bottles behind. I could never figure out why, so I began to take them. I tried
to inspect them as she did, tilting and tapping them, wishing I knew the secret
behind why they were rejected.
My
mother began finding treasures in my pockets: dandy-lion petals, eggshells, and
feathers. She always threw them away when she did laundry, so I learned to
bring them upstairs and stash them in my bedroom. When these disappeared, I
began a new collection in my uncle’s old cigar box, which I buried under my
sweaters.
This
all ended poorly though when my little brother found the box. I begged him to
not show her. I pleaded with my hands clasped that I loved all these things,
even though I didn’t know what they meant. If he had been smarter, he might
have commissioned me to do his chores. But he was delighted to carry his prize
down the stairs to our mother while I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.
That
was probably the same winter when the war started, because after that I remember
my dresses got tighter, and I learned how to hide the holes in my tights. Suddenly,
all our dumpsters were raided. It seemed as if the world had discovered my
secret. I never saw the woman again, though I saw what might have been her
bottles lined up on our windowsill. I helped mother scrub them every week. We
carried them in boxes to the front door of the factory, where we were given 5
cents. We put the money in a coin jar. Mother promised us that when it filled
up we could buy fabric for new Sunday clothes.
I learned too that the boys at school used the bottles
for other things. On dusty summer afternoons, they liked to sit outside the
church in the shade and drink. Perhaps it was how they made up for having bare
faces.
“Here, girl, try some,” they would tease, although I
still towered over them.
But one night the foul stuff made my oldest brother
angry. I think that his girl had broken his heart, because I never saw them
together again. I heard his boots clanging around in our alley, and then our
kitchen, and then our coin jar went flying into the street. Two years of
nickels shattered and hissed across cobblestone. I closed my window, and tried
to burry away the sound from the memory in my pillow. But then with my eyes
closed I could imagine the look of all of our silver coins rippling into dark,
like the silvery scales of fish slipping into the sea. By then, I had forgotten
about silly and beautiful things.
The next morning I found the nickels in a milk jar on
our porch. I counted them. Not one missing. I remembered that it was the
morning that Henry and Lillia would come with their milk. They were the twins
with dusty hair and long faces, except Henry was blind. I wondered how long it
took them to clean it up. I could picture Henry bent over the cobblestone, his milky
eyes closed, seeing through his small hands that moved over the grooves, Lillia
plucking a nickel and buffing it with her sleeve. I could not understand why
they would be so kind to us, why they wouldn’t just take the nickels for themselves.
Then years later, last spring came. I had just turned
seventeen and was wandering home after a long shift at the factory. My fingers
were stiff and my wrists felt numb, but I tried to massage them along the way
and ease the tension out of my back.
My favorite way home involved taking a short cut through
a rabbit trail that wound through a cluster of dark trees along an empty
riverbank. As I walked, a sudden wind rushed against my dress and pulled my
bangs out of my braid. It hurried me forward as if I were the deliverer of an
urgent message. Then a sound froze me. Feet rooted, I stood against the wind
and listened. It seemed like a voice at first, and then a series of voices, but
they weren’t speaking. They sounded like how it must feel to gaze out over the
ocean, like the smell that comes from rain spilling onto a dry street, and the
colors of oil puddles in the sunlight.
I followed
as if in a trance, into the dark trees that suddenly became a sun-streaked roof
above me. The world had become old and undisturbed. When the wind died, the
voices disappeared. Each time I had to stop and wait, my curiosity burned
deeper, and the fear of disappointment continued to swell up in my chest. But
the wind continued to return, as did the voices.
As I was brought
into the final clearing of trees, my knees locked and I stared. There it was,
the maker of the voices: hundreds of bottles, all different sizes, strung
together in rows. They were full of the sunlight and the murky shadows, full of
greens, golds, and blues. As the wind blew down and across them, they came to
life. I suddenly was very young again, watching the woman outside my window,
then staring into the dumpster, then collecting useless things in my pockets.
So here was her secret.
I made it a goal to come back several times a week,
sometimes before work, sometimes after. I began to clean them, slowly and
meticulously removing cobwebs, water and moss. They began to glisten like I
hoped they might have at their birth.
It was such a delightful discovery that I both longed to
share it with someone, but cringed at the idea of the risks involved. I still
knew nothing of the woman. It seemed as though she had completely abandoned her
project, but I felt as though disturbing it too much would be insulting to her.
I also began to notice new things. In the morning the
birds made noises that somehow fit together, like the way that wheels turn in
cars. I noticed if you looked hard enough, the sunshine bathed alleys in light,
unsettled their dust, and deepened their corners in purples. Children pointed
at these moments while their parents saw nothing. My mother could not
distinguish the difference between her shoes and mine, although hers were a
charred black, and mine rusty brown. I began to feel more alone than ever.
One morning on my way to the factory, I walked by Henry.
He was stooped over his stick, face shadowed by his cap. For some reason I knew
that I could trust him.
“Henry,” I began, not knowing what else to say.
“Louisa,” he said, nodding. I mustered some polite
conversation, and then brokenly explained my discovery in that strange patch of
woods. I still don’t know why he trusted me so much, but he lifted his chin to
the sky as if he could read the time, and then agreed to follow me. Although the
rabbit trail was rough and uneven, he walked it with a surprising ease. I
continued to glance back at him, but his legs remained steady and his brow
creased, eyes lost in darkness and thought.
In the clearing, we sat on a fallen tree and waited for
the wind to pick up.
“Any minute,” I said, suddenly nervous. He nodded.
After what felt like a century, a gust of wind shot
through the trees and filled the clearing with those sweet, chilling voices.
“Ah, music,” Was all that he said.
“Music?” I asked. “Is that what you call this?”
“What my mother did.” He turned to me with a smile. “She
told me that this could bring back my sight. I’m so glad that you found this
place. I thought that I had lost it forever."
