by Shelley Berc

Lucille Sutton watched her daughter grow. Twice a day, before school and right after dinner, the girl was presented to her mother in the dark bedroom.

What did you do at school today, dear? Did you eat your lunch? Did you get some fresh air? The normal questions that children have been asked by parents for centuries were never uttered by Olive’s mother. Most of the time she said nothing, simply stared at the child who seemed to grow larger and more unfamiliar every single day. But sometimes she would tell Miss Margaret to leave them and she would question Olive most particularly. 

She would ask Olive what she thought was going on in the stars at night. Did they know about us and what did she suppose they were going to do about it? How is their light made? What could she see behind her lids when she shut her eyes? What was the real color of darkness? What is light? 

The girl would try to answer these riddles but her responses never satisfied her mother and she would leave the shuttered bedroom each time feeling stupid and useless. Lucille, herself, felt sorry for the child after each meeting between them. She had always dreamed of being a mother, ever since she held her first baby doll, but the actual giving of birth had drained the life out of her. It was as if all the mother’s blood had gone into the making of the child. She never recovered her health and she developed the invalid’s aversion to light. As much as she loved her one offspring, she blamed her for what she had become. The Christmas when Olive was twelve, Lucille estimated that she had not left her bedroom for close to ten years. She was alarmed to see her girl so obviously growing up.

“She will soon be a woman, herself,” thought the distressed mother, “and she’s no closer to knowing anything worth knowing than I ever was.” 

For the first time in ten years, Lucille dressed herself to go out of the house. She tiptoed down the backstairs, unlatched the back door and walked to the railway station. She had a veil over her face so no one would recognize her when she climbed on the train to Chicago. She watched out her first class compartment window as the daylight slowly faded and the  green-golden fields became a purple darkness. She wondered why she had never done this before--get out of bed and go away, from the house, the child, Galatea, and especially Harry Sutton. She loved the dark with its whisper strings of stars that followed the train as it moved through the heavens. She alighted the city at midnight, took a hansom cab and went to sleep at the Palmer Hotel in a room of potted ferns and stained glass windows through which both night and day drew their breath in color- fractured glimmers. She slept soundly for the first time in as many years as Olive had life. 

Lucille Sutton returned to Galatea one week later, on Christmas Eve. She carried a very long and narrow rectangular shaped box wrapped in common brown paper under her arm and refused to say where she had been or what she had been doing. When Harry started to object that they had been worried to death over her and had called every single friend and family member looking for her, that even the police had been informed, instead of feeling ashamed (as she usually did for her habits), she told him to shut up. She silently placed the drab box under the electrically twinkling tree and returned to her bed, never to come down again and never to ask of Olive any more riddles.

On Christmas morning, the girl, her father, her grandmother, and Miss Margaret all gathered for the gift giving. Grandma Sutton flicked the switch that lit the blue, green, and gold bulbs strung up and down the Christmas tree. The lights were so bright that Olive could not see the pine, itself--only its black shadow was visible against the corner of wall into which the tree was tucked. For a moment, she wondered if the tree was really there at all or if perhaps only a succession of mirror bright lights was hanging in the shape of a tree in the Sutton living room. 

The choice of presents was disappointingly predictable--socks and petticoats from Miss Margaret, winter wool dresses from Grandma Sutton, and the usual toy bank from her father. Then at last, she unwrapped the plain brown paper that was taped around her mother’s gift.  It revealed a rectangular wooden box and for a moment Olive thought curiously that she was being given the pendulum case of a clock. But when she opened the box, she found lying on the green velvet lining what looked to be an empty tube. The thing was at least as long as she was tall and almost too heavy for her to lift, but with effort she did. 

“My goodness” exclaimed Miss Margaret, shaking her head, “it's a spy glass!  A spyglass! Hold that part up to your eye, dear, and just look what you’ll see!” 

Olive held it up to her eye, and aimed at the top of the Christmas tree, upon which shone the star of Bethlehem. Peering through the dark tunnel, the star on high seemed to be as close as the palm of her hand. 

“The woman ran off just to buy that!” Mr. Harry Sutton couldn’t help saying, his voice choked with anger and derision.

But Olive clutched it to her heart. It was the first present she could remember her mother ever choosing for her and what a gift--an object that could make things far away looks as close and clear as her own face. Without even saying goodnight, she stumbled out of the living room with her telescope and up the front stairs.

She passed her mother’s bedroom and knocked, but there was no answer though Olive thought she heard a muffled weeping. She ran on to her bedroom where she opened the glass and wood door to the unheated sleeping porch that jutted out like a precipice over the backyard. It was freezing, but Olive barely noticed as she screwed the pieces of the telescope together. Shivering in the room that seemed to exhale a crystal mist, she sat down on the floor and looked up through the open window where the moon shone white as milk in a crystal glass.

“This is where,” decided the girl, unfolding the instruction booklet, “Mama’s gift will live. It will stay here until the day I die, for as long as there are stars to see.”

The girl loved the brass and wooden cylinder that held the hand ground optic glass that caught the stars from millions of miles away and brought them right into her bedroom. She couldn't get over that glass could do this; that a material so light could propel her into the clouds, past the clouds into a clarity of sight in the heavens. 

The weight of the lacquered brass and the grain of the wood gave her a sure confidence in the instrument but she knew in her heart of hearts that all the work was done by the light, the invisible, glass. How she loved Ursula Major, the bear constellation. She loved to watch it roam the sky as it lumbered through the seasonal solstices. How it devours the black sky as it wanders! Olive thought. She marveled at all the stars that made the bear up; to her they were its muscle, its sinew, its flesh. To her they were diamonds, uncut unset, whipping up the body of a bear out of darkness. After awhile, she could no longer see these stars as stars anymore, only the body of the great celestial beast. And for years after this Christmas of her mother's only gift to her, at night when the skies (as they were then) went black as coal and again, in the purple dark that announced the Galatea dawn, Olive squinted one eye closed to the world on earth, and with the other eye wide open upon the lens of her telescope, she contemplated the heavens.

She saw that Jupiter is fat and round rather than just blurred and sparkly. She saw the green and golden rings of gaseous light around Saturn. She saw without a doubt the face of the man on the moon. But more than the shapes of moons, stars, and planets, she was in love with the quality of light that is the essence of the night sky. 

When she had her calibrations right, she could see the figures of the Zodiac, all the myths in the sky coming to life through the little lens. She moved the glass fraction by fraction and followed the path of the twins of Gemini. She imagines the golden, muscular suns making up the arms and legs of these giant heroes as they patrolled the Earth’s sky. 

She confided in them: "I am a girl alone, an only child.,” she whispered: “I know I am homely.” 

They answered: “We will marry you anyway. You, Olive Sutton, are really the most beautiful of all.” 

So for Olive Sutton, what need had she ever for an earthly man when she had the celestial courtship of magic twins? “What need have I?” she confidently asked the silent glass for the first time. How many more times in the times to come she would ask the question again.

Her eye fixed to the telescope, she pursued vision over the houses and shops and farms of Galatea, pressing on as far as the eye can see. She looked up to where she imagined God and the Beginning lay. “God in his Heaven” she mouthed the words “all is right upon the Earth”. 

But why can’t she see him through this scientifically ground lens that can see so much? Why not see God, the Father, or his angels who were so tangible on the printed page of her Bible? Where did they take shape, she wondered, her eyes lit up with the night’s luster of invisibility. 

If God made the world and all its creatures and gloried in the world and all its creatures, where was he? 

How could a world in which materiality was so important be made by a deity without form or physical substance? 

Why, if God loved shape and form so much, wondered the girl, had he deprived himself of a body? 

She decided to get a microscope next and investigate the minutia of things. She was determined to get to the bottom of substance--the things that startled her clear with their beauty, with the divinity of their patterns and shapes. 

“I will take it all to pieces to understand,” she vowed. “Maybe, God is microscopic instead of infinitely grand. Maybe that’s why we can’t see him, only his works.” 

Maybe she would find him there, under the microscope, centered on a plate of glass, hiding in a speck of dust.