wrong, but the interpretation of those visions. Sometimes it’s not possible to understand the images until you gain some perspective.” She was advocating more talk therapy and no shocks—at least that’s what I thought at the time. What she really meant, and what she told me years later, was that she had seen the same images herself. She had seen both images in the lace, the one of Lyndley and the one of the dogs. But she had seen them as symbols, while I saw them as real.
“I blame myself,” Eva said, already starting to speak in clichés. “I should have known.”
We all find means of anesthesia.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Eva told me with a sad smile. The shock therapy took away most of my short-term memory. It hasn’t come back. I remember very little of what happened that summer. Which is probably just as well—it’s what I signed up for. What it also did—what is really unusual, one in a thousand statistically—is that it took away a lot of my long-term memory, too. They assured me that it would come back, and much of it has. Unlike most people, who lose memory over the years, I remember more as time passes. It usually comes back in fragments, sometimes in whole stories. I wrote some of them down when I was at the hospital, but by the time I got to UCLA, I had run out. I didn’t last past the first semester. I told Eva I was dropping out because of the Stelazine, that I had double vision The Lace Reader 53
and couldn’t read, which was true. I took my first house-sitting job for a film director, and he got me a job reading scripts, first for him and later for one of the studios.
For a while Eva tried to talk me into going back to UCLA. Or into coming back and going to school in Boston.
Today the women of the Circle create their bobbins from the bones of the birds that once lived on Yellow Dog Island. The lightness of these bones makes the thread tension uneven, and it is this, more than anything else, that gives this new Ips- wich lace its unusual quality and lovely irregular texture and makes it so easy to read.
—T H E L AC E R E A D E R’ S G U I D E
u
Chapter 8
I would have won the bet. May never shows up for Eva’s funeral. Auntie Emma is there, escorted by Beezer and Anya, one on each arm. But May doesn’t even bother to come.
“May has her own way of paying her respects,” Anya feels the need to explain. “This morning she scattered peony petals to the four winds.”
I don’t comment. Anything I could say would sound sarcastic. When we get to the church, people are lined up outside waiting to get in.
Rafferty’s there, standing in the back of the church, under the organ, which extends two stories to the roofline. He looks awkward in his dark suit, more awkward in his knowledge that everyone is staring at him. Actually, it’s only the women who are staring. Rafferty is a good-looking man, a fact that just makes him more selfconscious in this mostly female crowd. 56 Brunonia
Barry
This is an old church, the First Church in Salem, but Puritan in its origins. Two of the accused witches were in its congregation. This is also the church that excommunicated Roger Williams after he went on strike and refused to act as pastor or even attend services unless it cut off all dialogue with the Church of England. He fled not only the church but Massachusetts Bay Colony, escaping banishment and going on to found Rhode Island, the test state for religious tolerance.
Today Salem’s First Church is Unitarian and about as far from its Puritan roots as a church can get. Still, those roots go deep. The last in a succession of meeting places, the Essex Street structure has changed considerably over the years. In the mid-1800s, when substantial shipping money came to Salem, the church was rebuilt in stone and mahogany, with hard wooden pews down the middle and soft, velvet-covered boxes (private seating for the shipping families) lining the walls. The light comes mainly through the huge,
“I blame myself,” Eva said, already starting to speak in clichés. “I should have known.”
We all find means of anesthesia.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Eva told me with a sad smile. The shock therapy took away most of my short-term memory. It hasn’t come back. I remember very little of what happened that summer. Which is probably just as well—it’s what I signed up for. What it also did—what is really unusual, one in a thousand statistically—is that it took away a lot of my long-term memory, too. They assured me that it would come back, and much of it has. Unlike most people, who lose memory over the years, I remember more as time passes. It usually comes back in fragments, sometimes in whole stories. I wrote some of them down when I was at the hospital, but by the time I got to UCLA, I had run out. I didn’t last past the first semester. I told Eva I was dropping out because of the Stelazine, that I had double vision The Lace Reader 53
and couldn’t read, which was true. I took my first house-sitting job for a film director, and he got me a job reading scripts, first for him and later for one of the studios.
For a while Eva tried to talk me into going back to UCLA. Or into coming back and going to school in Boston.
Today the women of the Circle create their bobbins from the bones of the birds that once lived on Yellow Dog Island. The lightness of these bones makes the thread tension uneven, and it is this, more than anything else, that gives this new Ips- wich lace its unusual quality and lovely irregular texture and makes it so easy to read.
—T H E L AC E R E A D E R’ S G U I D E
u
Chapter 8
I would have won the bet. May never shows up for Eva’s funeral. Auntie Emma is there, escorted by Beezer and Anya, one on each arm. But May doesn’t even bother to come.
“May has her own way of paying her respects,” Anya feels the need to explain. “This morning she scattered peony petals to the four winds.”
I don’t comment. Anything I could say would sound sarcastic. When we get to the church, people are lined up outside waiting to get in.
Rafferty’s there, standing in the back of the church, under the organ, which extends two stories to the roofline. He looks awkward in his dark suit, more awkward in his knowledge that everyone is staring at him. Actually, it’s only the women who are staring. Rafferty is a good-looking man, a fact that just makes him more selfconscious in this mostly female crowd. 56 Brunonia
Barry
This is an old church, the First Church in Salem, but Puritan in its origins. Two of the accused witches were in its congregation. This is also the church that excommunicated Roger Williams after he went on strike and refused to act as pastor or even attend services unless it cut off all dialogue with the Church of England. He fled not only the church but Massachusetts Bay Colony, escaping banishment and going on to found Rhode Island, the test state for religious tolerance.
Today Salem’s First Church is Unitarian and about as far from its Puritan roots as a church can get. Still, those roots go deep. The last in a succession of meeting places, the Essex Street structure has changed considerably over the years. In the mid-1800s, when substantial shipping money came to Salem, the church was rebuilt in stone and mahogany, with hard wooden pews down the middle and soft, velvet-covered boxes (private seating for the shipping families) lining the walls. The light comes mainly through the huge,
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