The Anchoress

It is darkening outside, and the doctor is leaving. He is finished. The cold circle of his stethoscope and the hopeful pinch of his fingers are still here and so is the too-bright bedside bulb. The lamp is on, and the blinds are down. The doctor came looking for improvement, but now he is leaving.

“Doctor.”

“Yes?”

“Could you open the blinds, please.”

Mother is at the door, holding his coat. She makes a noise that means it is not the doctor’s job to open the blinds, but he is already at the window. He pulls the cord, and the louvered slats applaud upwards. The light in the room turns a different color.

“More?” he asks. He comes to the bedside and switches off the lamp. “Darkest before the light,” he says, his smile angled down. Then he leaves.

Of course, the blinds are all wrong. They need to be opened, not raised. They are Venetian blinds and they serve no purpose when raised. The doctor has pulled the wrong cord. Imagine if he made such a mistake in surgery.

Through the still-open door comes the smell of vegetable soup, and Jolly to adjust the blinds.

You have to angle the slats just so. Not parallel to the sill, but almost. You have to pull them so they reveal the exterior and hide the interior. That’s what Jolly does. She opens the blinds and now Lou can see the road.

It is darkening outside. The sky on the right leads to dusk. On the left is the pale yellow end of daylight. The road runs between and stops at the window. It runs, not perpendicular to the window, but almost. Like the slats of the blinds, it is straight but at a shallow angle. And so, when Lou lies in bed, which Lou always does (seeing, unseen, the road — slatted, torqued, trumping-the-eye) she owns it, all of it — the via negativa.

Jolly thinks it a bit simplistic. “Unless what you mean is that the path is some sort of alternative reality. Do you mean that? Not negative in a negative sense but negative in a contrary sense? Like the way that is underneath the actual way? Like — ”

She runs a finger along one of the tilted slats and wipes the dust on her thigh. The residue is still there, a faint streak, and now the slats are misaligned. “Like a photographic sense?”

The smear on a dimpled denim thigh, the angle off, Lou no longer owns the road, which is now barred and blinded. It is winter and it is evening, and the streetlights will soon snap on. This is what Lou waits for, the moment when evening darkens, and the street illuminates the via negativa.

“It’s the reality of not-knowing,” she answers.

Lou holds out her hand and Jolly passes the cord. Deftly, with a click click, Lou adjusts the slats back into position. Not parallel to the sill, but almost. Just a few degrees, a downward inclination. This is how you gain sight unseen.

“It’s just a walk in the dark. That’s all it is,” she says as she peers into the road, her eyes a one-way mirror.

Lou is Jolly’s sister, and she is recovering from a long illness. Lou lies in the bed, day after day, and owns the road that runs almost perpendicular into her recovery. Lou has learned how to adjust the blinds from her prone position. Lou has learned how to see straight up the via negativa, and the moment she gives the most scrutiny is fast approaching. It is approaching, even as the doctor is receding. Lou and her sister watch him grow small, his bag swinging around the corner. He is gone.

Jolly turns away from the window. The bed is low, to let the machines roll up and over. The bed is narrow, to let the nurses reach up and over.

You have to sit gently on its edge, to not touch the body that is not yours and to not pull away the cover that might reveal the not-legs. They are legs, anyway, even when they are hidden. Her sister’s legs are hidden by a blanket. They are hidden by immobility. They have hidden in a wasting retreat from the recovery that Jolly herself made in record time months ago — in late summer, when the pools were still open to the imprudent.

Jolly and Lou had a cousin called Prudence. She was the most imprudent of all. Pru died, but not Jolly and not Lou. Pru, who used to be at home in this house as if it were her own. Pru, who always waved before turning that corner. Pru is gone. Is that a lesson learned?

There is a book on the bedside table and Jolly reaches for it. Sometimes Jolly reads aloud to Lou. But Lou says this book is not to share. Not yet.

Jolly does not like the look of the woman on the cover of the book any more than the faint rise that is her sister’s legs-not-legs. “Do you suppose they wore those caps to cover up their bald spot?”

Jolly has seen many portraits of this time, this medieval time. This plaguey pious passionate time when women corralled their hairline to the crown of their skull, plucked their eyebrows to match their hairlines and moved on skeletons fashioned of buttons and pearls. “Wimple, right? It’s a wimple?”

She runs her finger over the glossy paperback and shivers slightly, thinking of smooth, hairless skin. Jolly thinks of baby mice. Like the one on the television, motionless in the gloved hand, quivering as a giant needle makes a pucker on its smooth, hairless, belly.

“She probably wore it because her hair was filthy,” says Lou, who can clip her nails and blow her nose and rub cold cream into her neck but does not wash her hair. She has not washed her hair in a long time. “It wasn’t a wimple, though. Because she wasn’t a nun. She was an anchoress.”

Wimple. Whimper. Whisper. These are the sounds you make, are they not, when you can’t jump or shout? Bald-i-ness. Bodices. Bodiliness, is a word she used, this woman on the cover. This is a word she used six hundred years ago. Archaic. Anarchic. Cathartic. These are words, frozen in ice and time and physics.

Lou has not washed her hair in a long time, but she still thinks about hot water on her body. Sometimes she hears, in the clacking of the opening blinds, its echo — the racketysplash of soapy water squeezed from heavy hair. She doesn’t have much hair, now. She wears a turban. She thinks about the word headdress.

Jolly is thinking about the word anchoress. “Did she live in a lighthouse?” she asks. “I imagine her in a lighthouse. With a cat. A witchy sort of cat.”

Lou doesn’t ask why the anchoress should have lived in a lighthouse, because she had thought the same. To be anchored on a great turbulent sea. And to be, in that grounded state, a beacon. “Not a lighthouse, no. A cell, attached to a church. She was a mystic. She was strong. She wanted to be weak in body so she could be strong of mind. She prayed for plague and never got it, but she had a death wish.”

At the far end of the road, further even than the corner that the doctor has turned, two figures appear in the dusk. There is no telling if they are young or old, male or female, friends or lovers. Not yet. Lou will know soon, when they have come a bit further down her road to her window, unaware of being watched. She has read that some anchorites walled themselves into cells without doors, only a window through which they might contemplate. And receive bread.

“What’s the difference, really,” she says. “A door, a window.”

“An anchoress, a temptress,” says Jolly, fanning the thin pages of the wisdom of a recluse. “A fortress, a stillness.”

Lou and Jolly live in a big, safe house. It has three floors and brass knocker, and its front faces a cul-de-sac. The road that runs almost, but not quite, perpendicular to the window that is Lou’s is the only one — the only way, the only ingress. Jolly thinks of cells and food sources. The alimentary canal, she has learned, can be a very dangerous place. You get comfortable, roller-skating around and around in the cul-de-sac all day. If you mind your mother and don’t go too far down the road. You don’t want the world to pull you too far out. You don’t want to be swept away by the tide of life. You need to stay grounded, in sight of land. But, thinks Jolly, you wouldn’t want to skate in a cul-de-sac with no road. Just like you wouldn’t want to live in a room with no window. You don’t want to swim with an anchor round your waist. That would be worse. Much worse.

She puts the book back in its place and says, “Do you have a death wish, Lou? Is that what’s at the end of the via negativa?”

“I don’t want to die,” Lou says. “I would, though, like to rise again.”

Jolly thinks it’s a good answer. Funny, too. She says she’ll go and get the Jean Naté, now. Because Lou likes a bit of it in her shorn hair. “Make you smell like a lovely strong anchoress,” she says, hopping from the bed.

Lou is watching the road, waiting for the moment when the via negativa will emerge. The name comes from the anchoress. Lou knows that there were no streetlights outside of Julian’s cell in 14th century Norwich. She also knows that there were more people outside the anchoress’ window than here in her quiet cul-de-sac. Sailors. Sinners. Doctors as well. Wearing the beaked masks. Birds of prey. Easy pickings. The walkers are halfway up the street now. They pass through the slats unfettered.

Jolly is back with the bottle of Jean Naté. Lou removes her turban and pats the side of the bed furthest from the window so that Jolly does not block her view.

You have to use the cap as a cup, or the oil will run through your fingers and onto the pillow. You dab three fingers into the cap and those go straight up the center of the scalp, parting the hair, the waters, the hemispheres. The right brain is for mystics. The left brain is for science. The three fingers Jolly uses are the middle three. When she pins her pinkie under her thumb, she thinks of herself as a bishop.

“May the lord protect and anoint you,” she says, and Lou smiles. It’s a good joke.

Lou and Jolly sit in the darkened room watching the walkers pause outside the house. They are admiring the house, handsome and well lit, save for the bottom bedroom. Jolly raises her fingers to bless them as well.

“They don’t see us, do they,” she says.

“That’s the trick,” answers Lou. “That’s why. Now watch. Just sit quiet and watch.”

The walkers have turned their backs to the house and are returning, retreating, recovering the ground that runs straight from the window with sisters. Now they are fifty yards up the street and the first streetlight bursts into the twilight. It is on, and then it is off, and then it is on and then it is off. You can hear its heavy electrical leverage through the double-glazed glass. You can feel its thump of activity through the cold winter pavement. The bed throbs like a stiff heartbeat and the sisters sit quietly, feeling it. The second streetlight is now blinking, thump on and thump off. Now the third and the fourth, and the street is sentried by blinking lampposts, harsh and white with charged energy.

“I see,” whispers Jolly. She has accidentally rested her hand on the spindle that once was Lou’s leg. She tastes absence on her lips, feels a void in her stomach, hopes that her sister will not suffer pain ever again.

“That is the via negativa, isn’t it Lou?”

*

The doctor is nearing his home. His wife can see his hunched figure through the blinds. He passes through the slats like an atom passes through the curvature of time. This is what the doctor’s wife thinks, for she is neither a contemplative nor a doctor. She is a physicist, and she is full of wonder at the astonishing answers that modern science has revealed. Her confidence is infectious, and when her husband walks through the doors, she feels that she will need it to bolster him, once more.

“You’ve lost a patient,” she says, taking his coat.

“Louise Cuthbert,” he says sadly. “I thought I could save her. I thought she would never walk, but she would live.”

You have to listen when people face their losses. You cannot tell them about what still is not lost. The doctor’s wife leads him to the sitting room.

“The spinal fuse was, I think, healing,” he is saying. “But her lungs would not cooperate. She died last night. Mrs. Cuthbert told me when I stopped in. My last stop. He — Mr. Cuthbert — couldn’t even come down.”

The doctor and his wife are sitting on the sofa. Their backs are to the window and the darkness is outside. They don’t see, but they feel, the effortless solution of the streetlights turning on, sequentially.

After a time, the doctor says, “Perhaps they were meant to stay together.”

He looks hopefully at his wife, who often equates his patients with cosmic particles that remain entangled across time and space.

“It’s their second,” remembers the doctor’s wife.

“Her sister Jolene died in the summer.”

The doctor’s wife says nothing about fate or entanglement. She just hands him the paper lying on the coffee table. She had been reading it when she first saw him coming sadly up the road. It is news from the Salk lab. The vaccine is effective.

“All will be well,” she says.