“Minna—”
In the vast atrium of the gallery, Minna turned to Margaret. The museum was closing. Gravity was working on the gallerygoers, shaking them down from the upper floors. “You smelled of onions,” said Minna.
At that Margaret put her fingers to her nose, as though they still might be soup-fragrant. “Yes,” she said, despite herself.
“Now you believe me,” said Minna. “I’d gotten very crowded inside of Mama.” She demonstrated with her elbows. “That’s why I was born early. I remember all of it.”
Was this terrible news, Margaret wondered, or splendid? All those things she had whispered, when she’d thought the infant Minna didn’t understand English, when she seemed a well to drop wishes into. Minna, I love you. Minna, nobody loves you but me. I love you best, I always will. Little grubby girl. Little darkling. Beautiful Minna, you are mine. Shall we run away together? Shall we go where nobody will find us?
What she wanted to ask Minna now: Do you remember loving me, back then? She knew that six-year-old Minna loved her, in a dutiful, condescending way, as children love things they know they will outgrow. But did she remember that particular baby love she had for Margaret? You’re a wonder, Dr. Sprague had said to Margaret, when little Minna quieted in her arms. You are surely good with babies. You have her figured out. But it was only that Minna loved Margaret, and Margaret loved Minna, and they made each other happy.
“It was shocking cold, being born,” said Minna. She threaded her arm through Margaret’s, and they walked out of the gallery and into a chill evening, like that of Minna’s birth. Their own breath manifested in clouds in front of them; the clouds tore apart. Minna was still child enough to huff, to conjure up more fog, and Margaret joined her, two teakettles set to boil. Minna would know how breath did that, make itself known in cold weather; Margaret wanted to ask.
“It was shocking cold, being born,” said Minna again.
“It always is,” said Margaret.
By then Minna had forsaken the bowling alley entirely. As a child she’d visited every now and then, to watch her mother on her lane, but she couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t concentrate over the tumble of the pins but that people insisted on interrupting her. That’s a big book for a little girl! Or Look at you and your pigtails. Or You’re Truitt’s daughter. Truitt’s and that man’s. As a baby she had loved being peered at, admired, but at heart she was not like her mother: she minded being a curiosity. At least if she were one—and she was a curiosity, also at heart—she wanted to orchestrate it herself. She would not go to Truitt’s. I can’t read there, she told her parents.
“Novels have ruined many a young woman,” said Bertha. “That’s a quote.”
“From what on earth?” said Leviticus, whose idea of domestic life was the family reading together, in silence, until such a time as he found something interesting he wanted to read aloud.
“You’re not too good for your mother’s bowling alley,” said Margaret to Minna, knowing that she was.
Leviticus knew it, too. Bertha didn’t know it, and wasn’t. You’re never too good for the things you love, no matter how low. But Minna was better than Truitt’s. He was, too. They had to be better, and this was the thing that Bertha never understood. She could be low, and not care, she could oddball around town all she liked. They had to be better. They had to keep their eccentricities to themselves.
Music Minna pulled out of the air. She sang, all the time and for hours.
Who know what a cat loves?
I know what a cat loves.
Not mice even though they’re delicious.
Not lizards or roosters or fishes.
Cats love fire because
What cats do fire does.
Purrs and skulks and stays up late
Pounces twice to celebrate.
One of Minna’s songs could last half a day, and her father nodded, pleased, and paid attention every third verse, and her mother would maddeningly try to sing along—“I know this song!” “You do not! I’m making it up!” “No, I’m sure: I heard it in the long ago”—and Margaret would be driven to distraction—“Such a clever girl,” she would say, “but you’ll wear yourself out”—but for Minna, inside Minna, the feeling was athletic and exhilarating, like climbing a tree, but the tree was the song, and grew up from the center of herself: it kept coming and coming, though she never knew the next line, neither words nor tune, till she’d sung it. That was the joy. She had to concentrate—not to make up the next line, but to perceive it.
Her house was like that, too. She sounded it the way her father sounded a body: thrummed the heels of her hands against the metal staircase that led to the belvedere (she was not allowed to go up without permission), rat-a-tatted her fingernails against the windowpanes, whispered secrets into the obtuse angles of the milk room to see whether her voice would travel all around and back to her, the way her father said sound traveled under the dome of St. Paul’s in London. She sang down the bulkhead doors. She sang in every closet in the house. The house was a drum. It was meant to be struck. Margaret Vanetten was always saying, “Oh, you want a sister, you poor thing,” but Minna didn’t, she didn’t want to share the house or her parents or any part of her childhood.
“I think the house is a drum,” she said at dinner. Margaret Vanetten had tried to civilize them, to insist they sit in the dining room and make conversation with each other, but as a family they were hopeless, and preferred the kitchen, and ate like castaways. Dr. Sprague’s table manners were passable—he ate with knife and fork and never ladled food from the serving bowl directly into his mouth, the way his wife did—but he read books right in front of everyone and seemed surprised when asked a question.
“Daddy,” said Minna. “Do you think the house is a drum?”
“Do I think what, my Minna?”
“The house is not a drum,” said her mother, idly picking up a clot of mashed potatoes with her fingers. “It is an octagon.”
“A drum might be octagonal,” said Dr. Sprague.
“Might,” said Bertha Truitt.
“I think,” said Minna, “that at night, when we are asleep, the house turns on its side and rolls around the world, and all the furniture spins out to the edges.”
“What happens to us?” said her mother, amused but also concerned.
“We spin out, too.”
“That’s called centrifugal force,” said Dr. Sprague.
“That’s called quite an imagination,” said Margaret Vanetten.
“You’re right,” said Dr. Sprague. “It’s a beautiful imagination.”
“I meant—”
Minna sang, “The house is a wheel, the wheel turns around, the cats yowl about, we all sleep so sound—”
“The child needs a sister,” sang Margaret Vanetten in her iceberg voice. She saw the looks on the faces at the table and understood that she had spoiled the moment, but she wasn’t sure how. “I wish you’d get out of my kitchen,” she said, bitterly, to nobody, “so I could do my job the right way.”
Bertha felt Minna’s head nearly every day but didn’t read it, though it was a head finer (as Fowler said of all children’s) than any adult’s. Wouldn’t you want the best for a head like that? People would judge her on it anyhow. They already did, they looked at Minna and thought different things about her, depending on who she was with, mother, father, nurse.