Out of Oz Read online

  The local schoolchildren who had often before given Dorothy a wide berth now made irrevocable their policy of shunning her. They were unanimous but wordless about it. They were after all Christians.

  She’d learned to keep Oz to herself, more or less; of course things slipped out. But she didn’t want to be figured as peculiar. She’d taken up singing on the way home from the schoolhouse as a way to disguise the fact that no one would walk with her. And now that she was done with school, it seemed there were no neighbors who might tolerate her company long enough to find her marriageable. So Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were making this lastditch effort to prove that the workaday world of the Lord God Almighty was plenty rich and wonderful enough to satisfy Dorothy’s curiosity for marvels. She didn’t need to keep inventing impossible nonsense. She keeps on yammering about that fever dream of Oz and she’ll be an old spinster with no one to warble to but the bones of Toto.

  They rode cable cars. “Nothing like these in all of Oz!” said Dorothy as the cars bit their way upslope, tooth by tooth, and then plunged down.

  They went to the Fisherman’s Wharf. Dorothy had never seen the ocean before; nor had Uncle Henry or Aunt Em. The man who sold them hanks of fried fish wrapped in twists of newspaper remarked that this wasn’t the ocean, just the bay. To see the ocean they’d need to go farther west, to the Presidio, or to Golden Gate Park.

  For its prettier name, they headed to Golden Gate Park. A policeman told them that when the long swell of greenery was being laid out, the city hadn’t yet expanded west past Divisadero Street, and anything beyond had been known by squatters and locals as the Outside Lands. “Oh?” said Dorothy, with brightening interest.

  “That’s where you’ll find the ocean.”

  They made their way to the edge of the continent first by carriage and then on foot, but the world’s edge proved disappointingly muffled in fog. The ocean was a sham. They could see no farther out into the supposed Pacific Ocean than they’d been able to look across the San Francisco Bay. And it was colder, a stiff wind tossing up briny air. The gulls keened, biblical prophets practicing jeremiad, knowing more than they would let on. Aunt Em caught a sniffle, so they couldn’t stay and wait to see if the fog would lift. The clammy saltiness disagreed with her—and she with it, she did declare.

  That night, as Aunt Em was repairing to her bed, Uncle Henry wheedled from his wife a permission to take Dorothy out on the town. He hired a trap to bring Dorothy into a district called Chinatown. Dorothy wanted so badly to tell Uncle Henry that this is what it felt like to be in Oz—this otherness, this weird but convincing reality—that she bit a bruise in the side of her mouth, trying not to speak. Toto looked wary, as if the residents on doorsills were sizing him up to see how many Chinese relatives he might feed.

  After a number of false starts, Uncle Henry located a restaurant where other God-fearing white people seemed comfortable entering, and a few were even safely leaving, which was a good sign. So they went inside.

  A staid woman at a counter nodded at them. Her unmoving features looked carved in beef aspic. When she slipped off her stool to show Henry to a table, Dorothy saw that she was tiny. Tiny and stout and wrapped round with shiny red silk. She only came up to Dorothy’s lowest rib. To prevent her from saying A Munchkin! Uncle Henry said to Dorothy, with his eyes, No.

  They ate a spicy, peculiar meal, very wet, full of moist grit. They wouldn’t know how to describe any of it to Aunt Em when they went back, and they were glad she wasn’t there. She would have swooned with the mystery of it. They liked it, though Uncle Henry chewed with the front of his lips clenched and the sides puckered open for air in case he changed his mind midbite.

  “Where are these people from? Why are they here?” asked Dorothy in a whisper, pushing a chopstick into her basket so Toto could have something to gnaw.

  “They’re furriners from China, which is across the world,” said Uncle Henry. “They came to build the railroad that we traveled on, and they stayed to open laundries and restaurants.”

  “Why didn’t they ever come to Kansas?”

  “They must be too smart.”

  They both laughed at this, turning red. Dorothy could see that Uncle Henry loved her. It wasn’t his fault she seemed out of her mind.

  “Uncle Henry,” said Dorothy before they had finished the grassy tea, “I know you’ve nearly poorhoused yourself to bring me here. I know why you and Aunt Em have done it. You want to show me the world and distract me with reality. It’s a good strategy and a mighty sound ambition. I shall try to repay you for your kindness to me by keeping my mouth shut about Oz.”

  “Your sainted Aunt Em chooses to keep mum about it, Dorothy, but she knows you’ve had an experience few can match. However you managed to survive from the time the twister snatched our house away until the time you returned from the wilderness—whatever you scrabbled to find and eat that might have caused this weakness in your head—you nonetheless did manage. No one back home expected we’d ever find your corpse, let alone meet up again with your cheery optimistic self. You’re some pioneer, Dorothy. Every minute of your life is its own real miracle. Don’t deny it by fastening upon the temptation of some tomfoolery.”

  She chose her words carefully. “It’s just that it’s all so clear in my mind.”

  “A mind is something a young lady from Kansas learns to keep private.”

  As they began to pile up their plates, the Munchkin Chinee—that is, the little bowing woman in her silks and satins—scurried to interrupt them, and she brought them each a pastry like a crumpled seedpod. When Uncle Henry and Dorothy looked dubious, she showed them how to crack one open. The fragments tasted like Aunt Em’s biscuits, dry and without savor. Inside, how droll: a scrap of paper in each one.

  Marks in a funny squarish language on one side, letters in English on the other.

  By the red light of the Chinese lantern leering over their table, Uncle Henry worked to decipher his secret message. His book learning had been scant. “Mid pleasure and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” he read. “John Howard Payne.”

  “Pain is right,” said Dorothy. “Meaning no disrespect, Uncle Henry.”

  “He has a point, though, Dorothy. Be it ever so humble, and we have the humble part covered good enough, there’s no place like home. Now you read yours.”

  “My mind to me a kingdom is, Such present joys therein I find, That it excels all other bliss That Earth affords or grows by kind. Sir Edward Dyer.”

  “Dire is right,” said Uncle Henry.

  The hobbled, squinch-eyed woman in red saw them through the beaded curtains toward the street, but at the lacquered door she grabbed Dorothy’s sleeve. “For you,” she said and handed Dorothy a tiny bamboo cage. Inside was a cricket. “For ruck. Cricket for ruck.”

  Why do I need luck? Dorothy thought she’d spoken to herself but the woman answered as if she’d spoken aloud. (Maybe she had. Maybe she was dotty, a dodo, like the children had called her. Dotty Dorothy. Dorothy Dodo.)

  “You on journey going,” said the old woman, though whether this was an observation, a prophecy, or a swift good-bye, Dorothy couldn’t tell.

  Distastefully Dorothy fingered the little cage. The locusts of Kansas had made her dubious about crickets. Still, the little twiglet was alive, for it bounced against its straw-colored bars. It didn’t sing. “I don’t believe animals should be in cages,” she said to Uncle Henry.

  “People neither,” he answered, almost by rote. His one-note message. “Don’t cage yourself in your fantasticals, girl. Before it’s too late, get your mind out of Oz, or you’ll be sorry.”

  “I take your point, Uncle Henry. I’ve taken it for some time now.”

  “You’re welcome.” He put his hand on his rib and breathed through the pain for a moment.

  They walked down the street in silence, under a magnificently carved and painted gateway that spanned the street. Electrification had come to San Francisco and the gra
nite of the buildings glittered as if crystals of snow were salted into the stone. It seemed a nonsense-day and a half-night at the same time.

  Maybe Uncle Henry was right. Maybe there was enough in this world to make her forget Oz. But was that the right motivation for marrying a Kansas farmer, assuming she could land one?

  Only, she supposed, if he was the right farmer.

  At the hotel she begged Uncle Henry that they ride the lift up to their floor. “Your Auntie Em wouldn’t approve, fretting for our safety,” he replied. “Whether she’s around to notice or not, I never behave as she’d disagree with, in honor of her.”

  What a set of stairs to walk up, she thought.

  But when they reached the fifth floor, he winked at her and kept going. Three, four more flights. She followed wordlessly. At the top level they found a door. It opened easily enough to reveal to them a glowing cityscape. The canyons between buildings were running with light and sound. On the electric blue darkness, all around Dorothy and Uncle Henry, hung the illuminated windows of people in rooms. A museum of their living lives. Golden squares and rectangles. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “no fibbing—it’s better than the Emerald City! But where is the ocean? We’re so high. Can we see it?”

  They worked out which direction to look. This late at night there was nothing except for darkness. “That empty place without lights,” said Uncle Henry. “It must be there, though you can’t see it.”

  “Some say that about … other places,” she replied, but not harshly. “Beyond the ocean, what’s there?”

  “The land of the Japanee and the Chinee. A whole society of them, all talking in that singy-song way they got.”

  “And the ocean.” She could hardly bear it. “What’s it like?”

  “I never seen it yet, but tomorrow we can come back up here.”

  She was lost that night, when she finally managed to sleep, in the raspy claws of dreams that wouldn’t declare themselves fully. The cricket chirped on one side of her and Uncle Henry wheezed in concert. As the first light weakened the blackness of sky, but long before dawn, Toto began to whine. “Hush, Auntie Em is feeling poorly after our long trip,” whispered Dorothy, but Toto needed to go outside. Dorothy hunched herself into her clothes and grabbed the cricket cage, and let herself out of the room, leaving the door open a crack so she could return without disturbing her worthy relatives.

  It didn’t take long to find Toto a scrap of junk ground in which to do his business. Dorothy turned her head. Many of the lights were lowered now but there was a strange apprehensiveness to the street, like the setting of a stage in which a play was about to begin. The charcoal of the night decayed into a smokier shade, still dark but somehow more transparent. “Come on, we’ll be in six kinds of trouble if they find us out on the street alone,” said Dorothy. “Let’s go up.”

  In the lobby she saw the elevator man asleep in a lounge chair, his head to one side and his little cap askew. In that funny high-waisted jacket he looked like a flying monkey she’d once known. How were they ever affording this, poor dear Henry and Em, late of the Kansas prairie? So frightened of her. So eager for an acceptable future. She would make it worth their while.

  She stepped into the cage and pulled the door shut. The door was fretted, like sets of linked scissors, like the threads of an old apron if you scrub it too hard with lye. Connected to itself, but airy. There was a single control, as far as she could see. She gripped the brass handle and revolved it a full half turn, and the floor began to lift, with Dorothy and Toto and the cricket inside. She almost squealed, but she knew the merest sound might wake the elevator attendant, and she probably risked being put in jail for ambushing a lift and taking it on a joy ride.

  The perforated room sailed up past the fifth floor, all the way to the ninth, which led to the roof. She remembered. She tiptoed from the elevator cabin and shouldered her way through the door, into the chill of dawn above the ocean.

  In the few moments she’d been rising in the lift, the sky had lightened that much more. The effect was not so smoky, more pearlescent. The buildings at this hour seemed less defined by light. They looked like stone formations left behind after some unimaginable geologic event.

  She could make out a tongue of sea beyond the buildings to the west. But no sound from this far away. No apparent motion. Only a lapidary expanse dimming and shading into the sky. No horizon line: just endlessness. Sea and sky inseparable.

  Toto began to whimper and to jump around as if he wanted to leap from the ninth floor. “It’s not frightening, it isn’t,” she said, though she didn’t know whether she was trying to convince herself or the dog. “It’s just the ocean, and another world on the other side. You know all about that. You’re the best-traveled mutt in history, Toto. Stop your fussing! What are you fussing about?” The dog appeared to be going mad, running in circles around her and yipping in some sort of distress.

  Dorothy set the cricket cage upon the stone barrier that kept people from falling off the flat roof. “You can come out,” she said to the cricket. “I make my own luck, you make yours. Nobody should live in a cage. Never surrender to that.”

  The cricket emerged and rubbed some scratchy parts of itself together. Whether it leaped or whether the wind took it, Dorothy couldn’t say. The cricket guest was there one moment and gone the next.

  “Safe landing,” she called lightly after it. “Oh, all right, Toto, stop that infernal fussing. The wind isn’t going to take you, too. Once in your life was enough.” She picked up the dog and went back into the building. The elevator was where she had left it, quivering at this height. She would ride it down to the fifth floor, and go in and rest next to her uncle and aunt. She had spied something of the ocean, some little hem of it. The globe was round. She could see there was another world beyond this one. That would have to do. Meanwhile, some corn-blind farmer, walled on four sides of his life by Superior Alfalfa, was waiting for her.

  She began her descent. She passed the eighth floor and the seventh. About quarter past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, the buildings of San Francisco started to shake.

  To Call Winter upon Water

  I.

  One of her earliest memories. Maybe her first, it was hard to tell, time was unstable then. Swimming through grass that came up as high as her underarms. Or it may have been new grain not yet roughened by summer. Late spring, probably. Her chin stroked by paintbrush tips of green.

  Sunk in the world, unable to feel anything but the magic of it. Unable to take part.

  The field was as wide as the sky, while she was so low that she couldn’t see over horizons of any sort. At a small clearing where (she later realized) a farmer’s cart or plow might turn around, she came upon the skin of a mouse in the cropped and daisied grass.

  The mouse pelt was still soft and almost warm. Supple, not leathery. As if some snake or owl had caught the creature and eaten it through a seam, blood and bones and little liver and all, but had tossed aside, nearly in one piece, the furry husk.

  She had picked it up and dressed her forefinger with it, becoming Mouse. Quickening into Mouse. It had made her feel foreign to herself, and real. Realer. Then the feeling overwhelmed her and with a cry she shuddered the Mouse-shuck off her, away.

  It disappeared into the grain. Immediately she loathed herself for cowardice and the loss of a magic thing, and she hunted for it until the memory had hardened into a notion of stupidity and regret.

  She kept the memory and suffered the longing but never again was so real a Mouse, not for her whole life.

  2.

  Please,” said Miss Murth. “He won’t take no for an answer. It’s been an hour and a half.” She laid her palm on her bosom as if, thought Glinda, it were in danger of being noticed. Her fingers fluttered. Murth’s fingers were notched and rickety, like her teeth.

  “There is no need to be afraid of men, Miss Murth.”

  “It’s an imposition for you to be expected to receive visitors when you are not ‘at home,�
� but these are trying times, Lady Glinda. You must hurry. And I can tell by the bars and braids upon his dress uniform that he is a commanding officer.”

  “How commanding? Don’t answer that. At least he carries dress uniform into the field.” She worked with a brush and then plunged an ivory comb into her hair, buttressing a heap of it at the nape of her neck. Ah, hair. “This whole thing is vexing. When I was young and at school, Miss Murth—”

  “You’re still young, Lady Glinda—”

  “Compared to some. Don’t interrupt. How times have changed!—that a woman of position can be importuned almost at the doors of her boudoir. And without so much as a letter of introduction.”

  “I know. Can I help you in any way…?”

  Glinda picked up a small looking glass with a handle of rather fine design. She peeked at her face, her eyes, her lips—oh, the start of vertical pleats below the join of chin to neck; before long she would look like a concertina. But what could she do? Under the circumstances. A little more powder above the eyebrows, perhaps. At least she was younger than Miss Murth, who was hugging senility. “You may give me your appraisal, Miss Murth.”

  “Quite acceptable, Lady Glinda. There aren’t many who could wear a sprigged foxille with such confidence … under these circumstances.”

  “Considering we’re wallowing in a civil war, you mean? Don’t answer that. Show the unwelcome visitor to the pergola. I shall be down presently.”

  “In any weather, you do us proud, Lady Glinda.”

  Glinda said nothing more for the moment, just waved her hand. Miss Murth disappeared. Glinda continued to dally at her dressing table in order to buy time to think. Strategy had never been her strong suit. So far the time spent over her toilet had bought her precious little except for a manicure. Well, she could admire her cuticles after the chains were slapped on, if that was where this was heading.