Bottles

         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."