Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman

sea, swaying, the feeling of rocks underneath her feet.
    But she might never see that rock again, she thought.
    It was dark and she couldn’t see well. There was shouting in the distance. She felt bewildered, restless.
    She set down her glass and took off her sandals. She would feel better in the water, stronger.
    With casual elegance, she brought her hands in front of herbody and over her head and dove off the cliff. As she approached the water, falling beautifully, toes pointed, she wondered if she’d gotten mixed up and picked the wrong place to dive.
    She was falling into the tank again, the brackish water in her eyes, but no one was watching.
    She was cherry pie.
    She was a ticker tape parade.
    Her hands hit the water first. The water rushed over her ears, deafening her. Her limbs went numb, adrenaline moving through her until she was upright again, gulping air.
    She treaded water, fingers moving against the dark sea, pushing it away to keep herself afloat. There were rocks jutting out from the water, a near miss. There were strange birds nesting in the tall grass, a native woman bleeding on a straw mattress in a hut on the south shore, a stone house strangled by fig trees.

Norma Millay’s high school graduation photo.
    Camden, Maine, 1912.
    Photo reprinted with permission of the Camden Public Library.

NORMA MILLAY’S FILM NOIR PERIOD
ACT I
    Her earliest memory is a fever dream, her mother, Cora, retreating from her bedside, a backlit head surrounded by a pale yellow aura. Sailing, sailing over the bounding main , Cora sings, still in her nurse’s uniform with the puffed sleeves and starched collar. Where many a stormy wind shall blow . Her voice fades into silence. Diminuendo, thinks Norma, who longs to bring Cora’s voice back, to wrap herself in the familiar mezzo-soprano until she falls asleep, but now she’s left clinging to a thread of consciousness.
    Sometimes Cora sets the metronome on top of the old piano, adamant the girls should learn time signatures. “You don’t have the luxury of being mediocre,” she says, leaning over them with a humorless face. “Not moderato, allegro!” In the recesses of her mind Norma can hear the tick-tick-ticking increasing in speed until it flatlines into a solid wall of sound. She nods off, wakes up, nods off again on the damp pillow.
    The Maine winter is cold enough to freeze the soft curls on her head after a bath, and the water that leaks onto the kitchen floor,but tonight she sweats like it’s a July afternoon on the bay. She keeps one leg on top of the pile of worn quilts. She thinks of eating pickled figs in early summer. Her eyes are hot and a briny taste fills her mouth.
    Vincent and Kathleen share the bed, their downy knees and sharp elbows pushing at her back and legs, which she resents and cherishes all at once. The smell of their bodies, not so frequently bathed in winter, is familiar, something like lavender soap, sweat, and pine sap, which falls into their hair when they collect kindling for the stove. She loves knowing her sisters are by her side even as Cora leaves in the dark of morning with an ugly brown coat buttoned over her uniform. “You’re a tribe,” she told them years ago, on their first day back to school after typhoid fever, when she’d cut off their hair and they looked like pale, starving page boys in white dresses. “You stick together.”
    Norma realizes there’s work you talk about and work you don’t. She pictures her mother bustling around a tubercular patient’s bed, then cutting her own copper-colored hair at night and weaving it into the scalp of a doll. She imagines the rhythm of the needle as it pulses in and out of the muslin. Piercing, popping, pulling through.
    â€œTeach us how,” she and her sisters used to beg, kneeling at Cora’s chair, rifling through her sewing basket and the pouches of human hair she collected from