of ladies most deject and wretched

[chariestmaid]

The first feeling is fury. When Ophelia wakes from a warbling, uncertain dream like the reedy call of a recorder, there are tears in her eyes, but she can tell they're tears of anger. Ophelia would always cry, whenever she tried to argue on her own behalf, always broke down and bit her tongue before she got another word in. But if something saddened her, she could never summon tears. Her father didn't believe her because of it — she doubted her own feelings, doubted they counted if she couldn't express them appropriately. Hamlet could, he could swear his love with all the holy vows of heaven, before he ripped up his own words and threw them back at her.

And now her father’s left her, to weep herself to sleep. All propriety, all decorum left with him, not that it was been enough to cover her. He put his jacket on her shoulders instead of his arm, and turned his back to her, to go with the king.

Fury fades, and what remains is a drowsy numbness, a sense of wrongness as she sees herself as if from the outside: a missing cog in a breaking-down machine. What should she be feeling now? Ophelia doesn't know.

Hamlet was right, she thinks. She wasn't made to live in a court. She should have been a convent girl. She should have worn a veil, so no man could ever see her face, nor smear the paintings from it.  The chariest maid, her brother once said, is prodigal enough if she unmask her beauty to the moon. She keeps her eyes down, lest the moon catch her crying, or her angry tears unmask her.

When she looks up again, she's still clutching her father's jacket, thinking of the shame she'll bring when she's found out of doors. How did she come to be in these woods? It’s a quiet relief, after the stone walls of Elsinore, to see so much green.

Comments

[sagramore]

"I know not." He pulls the crushed strawflower out of his pocket and holds it out to her. "It's a place where we can live the way we are."

[chariestmaid]

She thinks of letters exchanged with Hamlet, letters and flowers, and all the private, philosophical talks she hasn't had since her father forbade her. They say the owl was a baker's daughter. "I know not what I am," she murmurs, "or what I may be."

[sagramore]

"Thou art beloved. I loved thee long before I met thee. Laertes speaks of thee to our daughter, and she longs to know her aunt."

[chariestmaid]

I loved you not echoes in her head, like a reverberating bell, loud and insistent. She almost covers her ears, for all she knows it won't help her. "I must be asleep," she decides, "and dreaming." A painfully pleasant dream that will hurt more on waking. She wishes she were not so wise, that she could let it lull her, and believe herself loved.

[sagramore]

"If it's a dream -- if it's only a dream, may I bring thee home?" Softly, as if she were a shy creature, a dog that's never known gentleness.

[chariestmaid]

She slowly nods. If it's only a dream, no one will chide her for going off with a strange man.

[sagramore]

Sagramore offers his hand, palm upwards.

[chariestmaid]

She curls her fingers over his, and finds him solid enough for a dream. The shouting match with Hamlet, the searing humiliation from knowing they were watched, weeping until she could weep no more -- those all feel like something like a dream. Muffled, and distant, more feeling than sense.

[sagramore]

"Good," he says, still so soft, and begins to lead her back towards the house.

[chariestmaid]

She lets her lead him, gathering her breath, taking step by measured step. (Once Hamlet told her how gracefully she walked; it was because she followed a rhythm. She learned it, watching other ladies circle the court, like a second heartbeat.)

[sagramore]

When they arrive, he opens the door and ushers her inside. It's strange to try to look at his own home through someone else's eyes -- he wonders whether, as young Laertes did, she sees all the imperfections: the uneven shingles, the insulated second wall added after the fact, the messy kitchen filled with the signs of family cooking lessons, child-sized aprons hung over the back of chairs and measuring cups no one bothered to put away, stacks of cookbooks in Turkish and Hungarian, Persian and French. The book of Jewish holidays he and Laertes have been studying, laid out on the kitchen table, open to Sukkot.

"This is our home, and thine too now."

[chariestmaid]

It looks like her brother's rooms -- that's the thought that nearly makes Ophelia weep. Not like his rooms at home, where every imperfection had to be tidied away for inspection. If their father spotted one thing out of place, it would lead to interminable lecture about ordered homes and ordered minds ... but this disorder seems truer to the Laertes she knows, his competing interests and passions and whole-hearted devotion to any subject of study that caught him at the time. And among the detritus of living, she sees all the little signs of family life. She didn't realize, until now, how many of those signs Laertes left, by always leaving one thing about place. She didn't realize how much he'd taken with him, when he went to France.

She misses him. But all she manages to say is, "It's beautiful, sir."

[sagramore]

He's not, obviously, going to put her up in the sex loft. It has to be Sunny's room, which she often eschews in favor of sleeping with her fathers -- the room is really storage for her treasures.

"Let me show thee thy room," he says, drawing her that way. "It's a little untidy, I confess -- our daughter keeps her things there."

Fortuitously, they recently exchanged the crib Laertes painstakingly built with a twin bed, flowers painted on the headboard. The sheets are patterned with rabbits.

[chariestmaid]

Ophelia doesn't remember what her nursery was like -- why should she? But she wonders if her brother remembered, if he remembered being a boy of six or so, held above her crib and told that's thy sister. "Does your daughter like rabbits?" she asks, neutral.

[sagramore]

"We call her little rabbit because she loves biting and chewing on things. She has remarkably strong teeth," his tone both fond and proud.