The Cure for Dreaming(51)

The dark-haired daughter snickered. “You were so funny at Sadie’s party, Ophelia.”

“It’s Olivia,” I said.

The girl stiffened her arms straight in front of her, and with her eyes wide and dazed, she droned, “‘All is well. All is well.’”

“That’s enough, Eugenia,” said Mrs. Underhill, slapping her daughter’s hands. “We’re only here for a brief visit. Let Dr. Mead proceed with business.”

“Yes, very good.” Father closed the front door and lifted a metal bucket from the little hallway table. “As I already discussed with you, Mr. Underhill, sir, I have found an innovative solution to our state’s peskiest problem. Imagine, if you will, your lovely wife no longer needing to manage the Oregon Association—and spending her precious time in more enjoyable pursuits.”

Mrs. Underhill arched her slender eyebrows.

“Imagine,” continued Father, “never having to worry about your dear daughter choosing the path of social impurity, or your son accidentally getting trapped with a shrew of a wife—a shrew who is only after your money so she can try to buy the vote.”

Mr. Underhill’s white mustache twitched.

“All of these worries will disappear,” said Father, “and become ancient relics of the past, with Henri Reverie’s Cure for Female Rebellion and Unladylike Dreams.”

Father pushed the pail into my sweating hands, and I half expected the preposterous name for the treatment to materialize on the side of the container, scrawled in the curved black lettering of traveling hucksters’ tonics and cure-alls.

Father lifted a piece of plain white paper from the bottom of the pail. “Mrs. Underhill, will you please do me the honor of slowly reading the words on this page so I may demonstrate the fruits of young Mr. Reverie’s work?”

Mrs. Underhill took the paper and again raised her brows. She cleared her throat and looked between me and that bucket, while Sunken-Eyed John and his tall, mustached father blocked my path to the door.

To escape or not to escape . . .

Mrs. Underhill drew in her breath and spoke the first word.

“Suffrage.”

My stomach moaned loudly enough to make John chuckle. He scratched his nose and muttered, “That’s what happens when you dine where you shouldn’t.”

Mrs. Underhill ignored her son and inhaled another short breath.

“Women’s rights.”

I gagged and dropped the bucket to the floor with a clank.

Mrs. Underhill’s next three phrases pelted my stomach like white-hot bullets.

“Suffragist. Votes for women. Susan B. Anthony.”

I covered my mouth and shoved my way to the door.

“College,” called Mrs. Underhill after me, and I tore out to the front porch, leaned my chest over the rail, and vomited into the bushes. Sweat dripped off my forehead and nose. Shivers racked my body. I just hung there, my ribs pressed against the rail, and let the fresh night air swim inside my head.

The soles of fine leather shoes pattered out to the porch behind me, but no one spoke a word until I turned around and slid down the splintery rail to the ground with a thump.

“You are most definitely coming to my election-night party, Dr. Mead,” said the missus, whose face blurred and wavered before my eyes—veering from slick carnival barker to silken society queen. “It’ll be held at the Portland Hotel at seven o’clock. Bring that hypnotist. Bring this girl. And let’s end this ridiculous fight for the vote.”





slammed my bedroom door shut behind me. Shelves rattled, wall lamps flickered, and wide-eyed china dolls smacked to the floor. A new sort of growl roared up from the pit of my stomach—not a moan of nausea, but a primal howl.

“I hate this!” I yanked on my hair and pulled out the tight pins. “I hate my life!”

I lunged toward the window and pulled back the curtains, ready to fling up the sash and climb down the trellis, despite my shoeless feet.

Bars blocked my exit. Thick copper bars that shone in the moonlight, secure as jail cell barriers—or the rungs of an enormous birdcage, as in the popular song.

She’s only a bird in a gilded cage . . .


“You’re not real.” I backed away. “I know you’re not real. Stop looking like you’re actually there.”

I grabbed my shoes and house key, shut my bedroom door, and stole downstairs to our tiny wood-paneled bathroom, a pine-scented closet added behind the kitchen when I was thirteen. Father—probably already sloshing about in a brandy-induced stupor—didn’t make a peep from his closed office hideout.

I gave the sink’s stiff spigot a twist, and the pipes trumpeted their usual high-pitched racket before water squirted into the cast-iron basin. I washed my face, scrubbed my teeth, and gargled with Holmes’s Sure Cure Mouth Wash until my tongue and cheeks burned.

My feet then swished back down the hall, silent as spider-webs, while I carried my shoes in my left hand. In his office, Father began singing some old ditty from before I was born.

I held my breath and opened the front entrance.

More bars—fat steel ones. I shut the door and bang-bang-banged my forehead against the wood.

You will see the world the way it truly is—not accept it. You will not accept it.

I lifted my smarting head with gold specks buzzing before my eyes.