As the tub filled, I watched myself bending over to twist the knobs, to scoop my fallen dress up off the ground, my belly folding, my breasts swaying. The first time I had seen my sisters dressing for the ballet I hadn’t been able to keep from staring at the neat lines of their bodies and the unblemished whiteness of their skin. Their breasts seemed polite somehow, unobtrusive; certainly they would never be rude enough to split the seam on a bodice. Their shoulders were slim, their bellies soft and flat. I always imagined they could be easily stowed away in a wardrobe like a starched white dress, slipped in among a dozen identical others. Your gaze would skim right across their bodies; there were no crags to cling to, no crevices to fall in.
I had always thought of my body as something that needed to be tackled and brawled, pelted and pinned down and bruised into submission, then trussed up like a chicken and laced into a whalebone corset. In my childhood I’d wished for well-mannered breasts and an obliging belly, for golden hair and violet eyes. I’d searched for spells that would breathe magic into my wanting. My eyes were the color of weak tea and so was my hair, wavering unenthusiastically between blonde and brown. Taken with my skin, which had a sickly yellowish tint, I looked as if I were trapped in a tintype photograph, sepia-toned and unsmiling.
But I’d only found spells that could drain beauty from their targets like blood from a belly-slit animal, and they all promised some sort of gruesome reckoning for their jealous caster, hideous boils or being turned into a toad.
Magic was always like that: it had ugly undersides. Wanting anything was a trap.
Most days I could not even stand to sate my own hunger. The fullness of my belly was unbearable, but with two fingers jabbed down my throat I could make it all vanish, turning back my indulgence like a scratched record, undoing it and making myself clean and empty and new again.
I tugged at the ribbon on my wrist, filthy knot still holding fast. On my other wrist was my mother’s charm bracelet. I unclasped it as I stepped into the tub, holding it up above the frothing water. The charms rattled like a sack of lots to be cast. Once I was submerged to the throat, I twisted off the knobs and let my body drift, half-suspended. My hair floated around me in clumps of sand-colored flotsam.
I could feel the grime sloughing off me, the glaze of onion and cooking oil, Fedir Holovaty’s fearful mists. Still holding my mother’s charm bracelet with one hand, I scrubbed between my legs until my skin hurt, wishing I could wash Sevastyan’s memory from me too. All my doomed and foolish desire. My body turned the bathwater a filmy gray.
I fondled my mother’s bracelet, the chain leaving indents on my damp fingers. There were eight charms and I knew them all by touch alone: the tiny hourglass filled with real pink sand, the miniature bicycle with wheels that actually spun, the thimble-sized whale with a mouth that opened on a hinge, the bell that really rang. There was a golden box inside which a paper note was folded over a hundred times, fit so snug that I could not pry it out, even if I’d ever dared enough to try. I didn’t know what the note said, if it said anything at all. There was a whistle that sang faintly when you blew into it, and an owl with little pearls for eyes. There was a book that opened up and had the names of my sisters and me etched onto its gilded pages, along with the years of our birth. I laid the bracelet over my face, the chain stretching from my brow over the slope of my nose, past the bow of my lips, the last charm dangling into my mouth.
I pried the little latch open with my tongue. I tasted all three of our names, tangy and sharp as a bite of bloody meat. That was the flavor of wet gold.
Soon I was clean and my thumb pads were pruning. I stepped out of the tub and dried myself and watched it drain, cloudy water spiraling downward. Halfway through, the pipes gave a choked protest, and the water ceased its circling.
I stopped toweling my hair. I knelt down next to the tub and dipped my hand into the gurgling water. When I pulled it out again, there was a small mound of black sand in my cupped palm.
A ragged breath tore out of me. I couldn’t fathom how the pipes had spewed the sand out at me. Could it have been chafed off my skin, rinsed out of my hair? I hadn’t been to the boardwalk in years, long before our mother had died. I could sometimes hear the tugboat horns from the garden, or smell the briny air seeping through my window at night, or see the gulls circling our house’s wood-rotted turret.
And then panic struck me like a match. What would Papa think if he found it? He would know we had been gone, and he would be right, even if my sisters and I had never dared wander as far as the shoreline on our clandestine outings. He would concoct some punishment even worse than what he’d already done, and I couldn’t even imagine what it would be, and that—the unknowing—terrified me to my marrow.