Necklaces by Rebecca Pyle

He had become rich by selling the family farm, a famous family farm which everyone had wanted their children to be at. There the pigs and the ponies awkwardly romped and galloped; geese kept moving in ways that made children laugh. Candles and cunning scone mixes in muslin bags were in the gift shop. Handmade cards which were neither attractive or unattractive, but were something to bring back from that friendly farm, were for sale. 

In September the state fair was five miles away; if you knew him he might take you to the fair and then back to the farm again: at the state fair he had special seats just for himself and any of his special friends or acquaintances, in the big slope-shouldered grandstand, halfway between the candied-apples stand and the place where you dribbled paint on a spinner and it made you an abstract. 

One of his guests’ children refused to sit with him, and her own parents, in the grandstand. Though she was only yet another flatlander (flat land was good for farms), the idea of a quaint and picturesque farm was ridiculous to her, trapped animals being mocked and made fun of or appearing on gift cards till they became dinner. A greenhouse, she thought, would be a better idea.

I’m going out to get on the Ferris wheel, she said, ignoring the surprised looks between her mother and her father and the rich man. The rich man, who would someday even grow richer, selling the big farm his parents had given him, looked most startled. She knew, or could have guessed, what it would all become, her parents even laughing someday about that man who’d probably hated the farmstead, laughing as soon as they learned he’d sold it all. The rich man admitting freely later to his best friends, yes, it had all been a great waste of time, all done only to honor his parents, the wealthiest farmers-for-show in the state, perhaps the whole country. He preferred the great middleman of the grocery store, he would tell many. Tired of strange children’s glee, he always would have preferred, he said, to have only his own real children around him. After all, he told people, after he sold the farm and the dozens of animals, all I was, was a zookeeper.

On the Ferris wheel, which she knew must have been designed to give poorer, real farm folk a glimpse of faraway, the faraway or near chance of leaving the family farm behind forever, she saw only into herself. She had seen many times this view from the Ferris wheel. What must she be, to fly away, escape? As a child she had dressed as a large standing mythic (made-up) bird, a thunderbird who could stop anyone in their tracks, send them to where they ought to be, by flapping its wings.

A thunderbird would find a Ferris wheel funny, limiting, sadly mechanized. A thunderbird could fly circles above the too-perfectly round wheel, a bird’s long looping oval circles. A thunderbird could change the weather, could change the smell of the air from dust-gray to Butterscotch, Equinox, Moonlight. Colors, too, to match. A thunderbird could make you feel you had walked too long down a rocky, sliding trail so you had to peel off your socks, stand in a good numbing stream. Could lead you to a place where only salads were served, lies were never allowed, bright and dark movies served themselves up to anyone, for free, in black and white on a screen which never stopped. Fate would choose somehow which films you happened upon. They were always without volume, the films. You were stranger in a strange land as you watched them; if the language was yours or not, it did not matter. 

The zookeeper would not be given the address. After he’d sold the farm, and it was soon to become a bed and breakfast, he would be returning to New York, where he was still studying, a few claimed, everything interesting about Andy Warhol and any films from Belgium and the Netherlands. Someday she would know Andy Warhol always wore a wig; only a few, and his mother, surely knew what his real head looked like. He had liked looking like an electrified genius? She, when she learned about his death happening while he was fast asleep on an operating table, hoped he’d been able to wear his magic wig during surgery. She had read he tried to turn living, popular people into saints. He surely wanted to be a saint too? He was a boy who wanted to live forever. Perhaps it was wonderful he had died the way he died, she would think someday: he died between real world and pretend-world.

As a child only boys had signs placed on their door, often by their parents, which said Genius at Work. The ink sketch on the placard was always the same thin boy-man with a prominent Adam’s apple, his feet up on a smallish desk. Many surrounding lines around his head suggested he was like the sun, that energy filling not only his head and his body but affecting also the room and the desk. He was doing nothing; he was only looking as if he might be thinking.

After her own escape from her parents and siblings and when she had her own hideout—Brits would sometimes come to her house. To be with her. But they were interesting, or trying to be; they had novels to write. It was daunting, they said, trying to write anything new, but new was what novel or novella meant. All she required was their leaving their boots or shoes by the door, because the house had an Eufy automatic disc-vacuum which couldn’t pick up a mud crumble or dry leaves or even one rice or oat grain, or fine sand. It loved, the Eufy, only dust, or bits of cat hair or cat food; it was a zookeeper, floor-keeper, for her dignified Maine Coon cat. 

Where are you was the message her parents kept sending. They couldn’t understand why she never wanted to talk with them. They added nothing she would have liked to hear. Only where are you, like the repeating call of a loon. 

We could send the police if we don’t hear from you, they said, in their proper voices.

Not if you want to speak to me again, she said. Deep down, she felt they were corrupt, the way Hamlet’s mother and stepfather were corrupt. Her parents treated the owner of the famous farm like a greeting card they could sit up on a shelf above their fireplace, and brag about to strangers.

She played the movie in her head. She remembered it in black and white. Yes, she was an important starlet. How white and glistening, surely rarely used, only for special guests, the saucer and cup he served coffee to her in. Whiter than swan. How quietly solid-colored the drapes, though the black and white film in her head would not give away the color. They could be loden green or oatmeal-colored or dullish pale red. How fresh and bristly the sturdy pile of the carpet, as if it had been taken from a beast which had gladly given up its bristly pelt even though it was in its youth. She could not remember its color, but it must have been the best kind, expensive, bristly and upright like a man’s crew-cut. The fireplace had not been lit. No effort had been made to light it. Though it was cold spring. She was little-gray-riding-hood: her hooded sweatshirt was a mottled gray and white, and so were the matching sweatpants. Her shoes had probably been a dusty blue. Underneath, beige socks, a brassiere of the palest and most-beige color, and, similarly, beige-est underwear. She still believed underwear should only be beige; all of you, underneath, should be beige. She could not remember the physical things. What saved her was a memory of the thick bedspread, dark as navy blue shadow, but in the film looking almost black, which in her mind changed from one rectangular imagined scene after another: a bay, a series of clouds, rock-climbing scenes with one person far ahead of the other, but moving downhill instead of uphill. And, finally, golfers, all saying strange things to each other, hurrying to finish before the golf club’s snack bar closed. I’m rich, he kept telling her. Rich, rich. You can be rich too. Keep making it up as you go.

She swore then she would escape to a house in woods which no one could find. To go often out of the woods to a city coffee shop where writers came to read their work and sold a copy or two of the floundering, foundering books they’d managed somehow. All her friends, all Brits, loved repeat attempts at authorship; the puzzle, the hunt, kept getting closer, the novels kept becoming more and more sadly their new child, their new horse in a race. They, the Brits, used her new name, but did not ask questions about why she had wanted a new one. The zookeeper of wealth would never find her, she thought. They, the Brits, must have thought so, too, because they said it didn’t matter if he was rich and famous and sent her postcards; he didn’t deserve to be a guest.  He would only mock how poor and rootless they were, they told her. His home and his wealth and power had betrayed her, they said; that place where she had told them he had served her coffee though she did not even like or want coffee. You were a child, they said, even if you were twenty-one or twenty-two. 

But I didn’t live in a house by the sea, she said. They had looked at her then as if she was not genius, but crazy. Someone who didn’t understand that the coffee he served her should have been diluted with milk or cream; if he had done that, if she had insisted on that, she would have better survived.

There was a series of necklaces she had left behind in her parents’ house, and sometimes they, the Brits, walked in on her as she was pulling at the air with her hands, pretending the long necklaces were in her hands and she was pulling the necklaces hard enough all their beads would snap off and roll. She wanted to pull each necklace with two hands and send beads everywhere, everywhere, which would feel like a Ferris wheel tumbling down, never again to give farm children too-limited ideas about faraway.

Rebecca Pyle is an American writer/artist (rebeccapyleartist.com) splitting this year between America and France. Her fiction and poetry appear in The Chattahoochee Review, Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Otis Nebula, Pangyrus Literary, and SEISMA. She’s never set foot in Australia, but she’s just completed a novel about an American who completes his life in Australia.

27 July 2023