Witch Window

“And moving thro' a mirror clear

That hangs before her all the year,

Shadows of the world appear.”

-The Lady of Shallot, Part II, Alfred Lord Tennyson

(I wrote once, instead of a clock, I want to measure my life by the river-but, in reality I want to measure it by both.)

It was a two-nightmare night, a fragile sleep. My son ambled into our room and sandwiched himself between me and my husband, inconsolable. My side of the bed is directly under the witch-window. Instead of settling, he stared past me to that long rectangular window that hugs the roofline, and then, furtively, back to the door he’d entered from, and pleads with me to return to his room, his bed. I give in. Within a few minutes of adjusting to his domain, I see my youngest daughter, his roommate, wander off unsuccessfully to find me. She returns, rattled by her own dream (and not finding me) and climbs in with us. Now the three of us are crowded into the smallest bed we have, the center of our upstairs, a clumsy circling of the drain. They fell back to sleep, I didn’t. I hear the town clock strike 3, then 4, 5, 6 marking its way to dawn. It is many hours into the safety of the sunny day that I decode why our big bed, peopled and cozy, didn’t provide enough comfort. My son finally admits he was afraid of what could come right through the glass, the bed’s proximity to that portal of dark sky was too much.

My kitchen window frames the town’s church steeple and two faces of the town clock. It’s a clock that habitually stops, almost weekly, and our neighbor fixes it. I’ve lived here over a dozen years, and it still takes me by surprise. I’ll be doing dishes and the chimes unnaturally build up, passing 12 chimes, 15, 16, 17; it eerily pokes through my consciousness. I look up to see the gold hands spinning furiously through their hours until they reach a close approximation of that moment’s real time, then we more or less depend on the clock’s accuracy until it stops again.

I have tried to make bubbles freeze before. I have tried to make them glow. I’d constantly make stationery by infusing them with food coloring and catching their swirly rivers on envelopes. When capturing those bubbles, the explosion against the paper would send a constellation of dye back at my face and up across the arm holding the wand I was blowing through. All through high school, I worked every day at a Quaker Friends boarding home. I’d self-consciously refill water glasses and place communal baskets of bread and butter in the center of the tables with dark specks of color staining my arm, paler stains I at least attempted to scrub, freckled the bridge of my nose.

On more than one occasion someone has given me a picture of a girl blowing bubbles. It is the image of myself I feel most comfortable with, the one I aspire to be. Tillie Olsen has her character Emily say to her mother, “Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painter his mother in a rocker, I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.”* I’ve often wondered what my kids would picture. No amount of wishing would make it a girl blowing bubbles.

Bubbles (1907) Amy B. Atkinson

I recently found this box of old letters and souvenirs. It was a haphazard box, its contents concentrated around my early twenties, the years just following my dad’s car accident, a time I was mimicking a bubble: floating from experience to experience, moving and travelling and sleeping around-the whos and wheres of this time. All swirls and eddies, no direct currents. There were lots of possessive pronouns in the box; letters that mentioned missing my cartwheels, wanting to see my woods, my eyes, my dreams…they made me nostalgic for the feeling of possession. I’m hardly ever denoting something as whimsical as a cartwheel these days let alone one that’s mine.

Mixed in among the letters I found a small abstract painting I did in my 21st summer. That summer I was the antithesis of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot.” I constantly stared out the window, down on the town. It was a third-floor apartment, tower-like, high above the Winooski river. I’d perch on the fire escape and eavesdrop; I barely looked at any mirrors. Where the lady toiled to weave all she saw, lest the curse be upon her, I smoked joints and watched the incense smoke’s shadows curl up the wall my bed faced while I conjured. I was pondering my lovers (and almost lovers) up until that point in my life. I took a piece of paper and painted myself--two drowsy black half-circles represented my closed eyes--and then I painted a circle design above and to the right, at about 2 o’clock (my dreams?), then I painted a quick circle design for each one, clockwise, fast, without much thought, not quite reaching 12 o’clock. My future husband was 6 o’clock, our circles practically identical. This self-indulgent litmus test seemed so accurate when I found this box of keepsakes--perhaps in that way I was most like the lady--I’d have cracked any mirror for him: a bow shot away, black curls, Tirra Lirra, Tirra Lirra.

Before we were even a couple, I wrote this about my husband in one of my journals, “there are three simple shapes on my bed, three pillows, I only use one. Charles calls the other two “the guest pillows.” So, when we were going to bed one night, after making love, like a tree arching over a river, he asked me, “are these my pillows?” My aloneness felt a ripple go through it. Part of my heart wanted to say, “They are your pillows.” I wanted to say they will always be on my bed, their simple shapes sitting amongst the crumpled shapes and stains and books. I wanted to say they’ll be yours whenever you choose them to be. I didn’t say any of this. I smiled and we fell asleep.

Our lives are so different now, so hugely swallowed up by what we’ve created. I call my children spinning tops, our marriage deserves its own noun; maybe a block tower? Our jobs seem like sponges that soak up too much of our energy, and then there’s the garden and groceries, and laundry, and floors that get really, really dirty. I think about the Lady of Shallot, half-sick with shadows, only ever seeing the world through reflections on her mirror, rendering all she saw unto her tapestry. She had no past, no future, never took a lover. That old box of letters made me daydream about myself as if I were a ghost. Maybe that’s wrong, the letters actually made my present-day existence ghost like. The younger self alive.

What’s to be done with my fixation on analogies? Hundreds of years ago folks could make sand dance into circle and star patterns, just drawing a bow across a metal plate, perhaps naively I expect that type of epiphany. If I’m not the girl blowing bubbles, who am I? The bubbles I caught on paper seemed like worlds. It occurs to me that if a bubble floated by the Lady’s tower window, I’d see her and her tapestry in its reflection. I try to think of solutions to her curse, some Droste-esque riddle. I imagine so many bubbles, just pillars of them rising to fill every corner of her window-their iridescent spheres jam all the frequencies and she can look out, descend the stairs, and walk out unscathed…his doesn’t address the problem of heartbreak, but what does?

Bubbles “pop”, mirrors crack in half, rivers curl around and reflect the clouds in their tinted whirls. I am not half sick with shadows. This is not just a life, it is “the” life, it is “my” life. The article is definite. The pronoun is possessive. The truth is you’re both living and dying the whole time and no arithmetic, lazy or otherwise, can really change that. The numbers on the clock sometimes chime past twelve. The geometry of the indentations on the mattress, and the number of eyes opening and shutting to dreams on shared pillows changes from night to night.

The same river is behind my house that kept me company while I painted my picture--but it’s not seen from a height anymore. The stretch we have now is welcoming and soaks your skirts and pant legs with a short gradual incline. I had a nightmare once where we had moved slightly out of the village and our home was no longer beside the river. I woke up devastated. Like a fairytale I have always worked in buildings that hug this river-- I’ve brought plates of food and brews of coffee and distillations and concoctions, beers and wines--all the offerings anyone has ever craved.

I’ve sent letters that shouldn’t really be sent, cast spells for lost creatures, I’ve waited while clay dried before swimming myself clean, catching my breath before a next kiss, leaving a newly born child in someone else’s arms for the first time, because I wanted to tell the river her name. If there was a way to measure all the cross-sections, days upon days of mud cakes and small cities created, lasting until the next rain, stolen glances at it as I drive back and forth, living this life…it would be much longer than the 90 mile swirl it leaves on a map. If I asked the river who I was it would maybe say I’m now the Lady who dreams under the slope of the witch window.

*I Stand Here Ironing, Tillie Olsen