9781250816214

“We’re all happy, Maestro,” Mrs. Lyon pronounces brightly, but Sophia
watches her dig her long nails like claws deep into the pale yellow arm of
her sofa. “Positively blissful. Don’t you worry about us.”
Sophia says nothing. They have answered for her. She does not need to
speak. It is always a blessing and a relief to be spoken for. But they all stare
at her, waiting, until the quiet mounts to such a roar that she can hear time
crawl.
“I am happy, Mr. Semengelof. How could I be otherwise? I am fed, I am
housed, I am busy, I am loved.”
Her voice catches on the last word. She thinks of the bone hairbrush.
The stiff, stinking pig bristles. The black marks. The shaft of reeking hair.
She falls back on the familiar. She wraps herself in its comfort.
“I was made for him,” she finishes, the quaver in her voice
infinitesimally small.
“Do you lack for anything, Sophia? Or perhaps instead there is some
small displeasing item in whose removal you would rejoice?”
Sophia could tell him now. About the brush and the hair and the smell
and the dust on the ammonites in the stone knob on her dressing table
drawer. It almost seems as though he already knows, that he’s given her this
and only this chance to have it all done with.
She does not know why she lies. She only knows she cannot tell the
truth. They are hers. Her house. Her dressing table. Her ammonites. Her
hideous boar-brush. Her secrets to keep.
“No,” Sophia says smoothly. “Nothing.”
The music teacher sighs, a long exhale of sadness. But he seems
satisfied. He begins to play, and for a moment Sophia fully and truly thinks
she will die. The sound of it is a knife, if a knife could kiss, and the kiss
could turn the color of morning. There is no sense to the song. It crashes
and whispers and cajoles and weeps and admonishes and commands all at
once, without progression from one feeling to the next. Yet it contains a
perfection that is twin to pain.
Sophia does not die. The kiss and the knife and the color go on and on.
The man does not play music. The man is music.
As the song like pure starlight fills the room, Sophia slowly draws up
her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around her whole self, and begins to
rock back and forth. The three older women idly open their hostess gifts,