The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “You were very good,” I said wearily. “No one said you weren’t, Mayleen.”

  “You and Maybelle are twins,” said Bryan in his falsely jovial, ‘speaking to Mayleen’ voice. “Equally good, equally pretty, equally smart, in everything.”

  I found myself thinking desperately, Oh, dear God, if that could only be true! Some days I wished Mayleen had had the heart trouble so she’d have less energy to devote to dissension, dissatisfaction, or to discovering new injustices she had suffered. Some days I thought Mayleen was sixteen going on two, and Maybelle was sixteen going on fifty.

  Bryan stopped and turned toward us, asking, “Who’s that man staring this way, Margaret? Is he staring at the girls?”

  “Billy Ray Judson,” I said quietly. “You know his parents, Bryan. Judson owns that farmland north of the Conovers’ place. We’ve met them and the younger half brother and sister several times. They were at the Ruehouse Festival last month.”

  Bryan nodded, forehead furrowed as he dredged up the memory. “Oh, yes. James Joseph is the boy, the girl’s name is Hanna. James is a nice, polite boy, but even if we know the family, his brother shouldn’t be directing that sort of stare at a schoolgirl.”

  “I’m not a schoolgirl,” said Mayleen. “He likes me, that’s all. You don’t think people should like me?”

  “Of course people should like you,” I said with a degree of desperation, wagging my eyebrows at my husband, who ignored me in favor of returning the Judson boy’s stare with a slightly censorious one of his own. “Your father just means you’re a little young to get involved with someone Billy Ray Judson’s age.”

  Maybelle started to say something, thought better of it, and tugged her sister by the hand. “Race you to the house,” she said.

  “I’ll just walk,” said Mayleen, sauntering slightly away from our family group to smile enticingly at the Judson boy.

  Bryan started to say something, and I snarled, “Don’t,” in my firmest voice, locking my arm through his and speeding my footsteps to abbreviate the whole encounter. Maybelle moved along quickly at my side, asking her father a question about the clinic, thus deflecting him from saying, thinking, or doing anything about Mayleen. Meantime, I considered for the thousandth time the subject of twins. Twins should be similar, and identical twins should be identical; but Maybelle had all the goodness and good sense of any two normal people, and Mayleen had none at all. That fact was both frustrating and painful, for in any future I could imagine, Mayleen would carve out a hard and unrewarding life for herself.

  This line of thought led inexorably to another: It was probably best that my first babies, the twin boys born soon after Bryan and I arrived on Rueful, had died at birth. Mayleen and Maybelle had been the second set, and we’d stopped there. I no longer grieved over the two dead children. Though Maybelle was a kind, good girl, if the two who had died had followed the girls’ pattern, there might have been at least one like Mayleen. Having even one more like Mayleen would be insupportable. I simply could not have managed.

  This little exchange had hooked me on one thorny link of an endless chain of interlocking memories, all of them embarrassing or hurtful, all of them inappropriate for a woman who had just been to the Ruehouse! I made myself look at the clinic up ahead, pure white, shining like a beacon, without a spot on it. Wrong word. I derailed again, wishing my life could be that spotless, gritting my teeth in fury and ordering myself, STOP THINKING. Stop regretting. Stop chasing yourself around like a dog after its own tail! The memory chain went only one place! Back to Earth on the day the proctor came, never anywhere else!

  During our first couple of years on Tercis, while Bryan was teaching me to help him in his work, he had told me I was a natural healer. Since virtually all of what Bryan called “healing” I found intensely embarrassing and distasteful, I’d choked on that accolade. Sometimes I thought my repugnance was some failing in myself, other times I wondered if any solitary child reared without intimacies on Phobos, as I was, could grow up to be comfortable with the duties “healing” required. Doing it for sixteen years hadn’t made it any easier, but the bargain I’d made with myself required that Bryan and the children never know how difficult and disgusting I found it. I’d kept that bargain! They didn’t know, but I did. I’d found no way to keep myself from knowing it, hour by hour, rue it on Rueday though I would. I sometimes felt it would have been easier to labor in a Cantardene mine with a whip at my back than to do the things Bryan expected of me.

  As we mounted the porch, I glanced back to see Mayleen flirting and giggling with the Judson boy. The Judson man. He had to be at least in his midtwenties. I stared, openly disapproving, until he shrugged and turned away. Mayleen waved and called after him before unwillingly joining the rest of us.

  “It’s nice to have paint on the house,” I remarked in the complacent, calm voice I’d practiced until it became second nature, the one that carried just the right message of everything’s lovely, everything’s just fine I ran my hand along the door molding. “It really looks wonderful.”

  “Never saved the life of a painter’s son until this spring,” said Bryan, with a wry twist to his lips. “So this is my first paint job as a fee. Pity the boy didn’t get sick a decade or so ago.”

  “Better late than never, Daddy,” said Maybelle. “You always say so.”

  He did always say so. He always said a good many things: that every day was a beautiful day; that our troubles had all been worth it; that each year would get easier; that we had a good, pleasurable life; that we’d done the right thing; that he was better off here than on Earth. Maybe he really believed it, but I’d been too busy atoning for Bryan’s self-sacrifice to have entertained the notion it had been anything but a martyrdom for him. No matter what he said, I knew what he’d sacrificed.

  “Where’s Daddy, Mom?”

  “Out back, Maybelle. Don’t bother him.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Hen Kelly’s mother died.”

  “She’s been dying for years. Daddy shouldn’t feel bad. It isn’t his fault.”

  “He thinks…he knows he could have cured her back on Earth. It makes it hard for him.”

  It was hard for him, and what could I do to make it up?

  He’d ask, “Where did you get this piece of equipment, Margaret?”

  “I think someone brought it in from the next Walled-Off, Bryan. Is it something you can use?” He’d been grieving over not having it for two years, and it had taken me a year and a dozen broken regulations to get it smuggled in.

  “Of course it’s something I can use! But it’s not a technology we’re permitted to have yet. The Walled-Off Inspectors…”

  “Let me worry about the Inspectors,” not mentioning the valley grapevine I had tapped into, the informants I paid off with eggs or fruit or other barter that patients had offered to meet their bills.

  “I didn’t think we could afford a larger furnace for the clinic, Margaret.”

  “Bryan, it’s one that was taken out of a building being remodeled up in Contrition City. It didn’t cost anything.” It really hadn’t cost anything: except the time spent in cultivating Billy Ray Judson’s father, who did a lot of remodeling in Contrition City; except for the pies I baked every few weeks for the wagoner who brought it down to Crossroads; except for the winter’s worth of preserves I’d given Abe Johnson, who had put the boiler and pipes together. Most of the clinic improvements came about in similar ways: the windows, the added room, the shelves in what Bryan was pleased to call the pharmacy.

  “I saw Daddy out back again, and I think he’s crying!”

  “I know, Maybelle. The little Benson boy died.”

  “I thought Daddy knew how to fix his back.”

  “Daddy did know, dear. Daddy just didn’t have the special medical equipment he needed in order to do it.”

  Every day I told him that I loved him, though I’m afraid my love weighed light on the scales, particularly as lovemaking became infrequent
, then rare, then extinct, killed off by unending exhaustion.

  Still and all, I had seldom seen him lose his temper, and never as badly as he did a week or two later when Maybelle said to us quietly, privately, while Mayleen was somewhere else, “Daddy, Mom, I’m pretty sure Mayleen’s pregnant by Billy Ray Judson.”

  As the words left Maybelle’s mouth, Bryan turned as red as an apple, and his face swelled. “Get your father a glass of Hen Kelly’s best,” I demanded. Maybelle darted toward the kitchen, and I seized my husband’s shoulders and pushed him into a chair.

  “She’s not going to marry that ne’er-do-well,” he grated. “That…”

  “Bryan, hush. Listen to me. I know you’re angry. I’m angry. But I’m not surprised.” He erupted under my hands, and I thrust him down, hard. “No, don’t say anything, just listen. I’m not surprised. It’s exactly what we could expect from Mayleen. She isn’t Maybelle. She’s another person entirely, and nothing I do or you do is going to make her grow up or become sensible. Now listen to me!”

  He stared at me, amazed. In all the time we had been on Tercis, it was only the second time I had raised my voice to him, and it was definitely the first time I had openly acknowledged Mayleen’s particular…difficulty. Maybelle came in with a glass of Hen Kelly’s five-year-old best. I put it in his hand, and said, “Maybelle, close the door and watch out the window to be sure nobody’s out there listening.”

  I leaned over Bryan once more: “Billy Ray’s father has built up a good construction business in Contrition City. Judson was married twice. His first wife got herself killed in a drunken brawl in the tavern where she evidently spent most of her time, and it’s doubtful whether Billy Ray is actually Judson’s son, though he’s always treated the boy as his own. It was the second wife who reared Billy Ray, along with Hanna and James Joseph…”

  “I’m really not interested in their damned family history,” snarled Bryan, lowering the glass.

  I laid my fingers on his lips. “Bryan, the family history is important! Judson still has title to the land he was awarded when he first settled here, near Crossroads. He built a house on the piece across the river and lived there for a few years, but he never farmed it because by the time the population built up to the point market farms made sense, he already had his construction business well established. Now lately, Billy Ray’s been talking about farming. His father told him it was a hard life, and he wouldn’t advise it…”

  “Advising Billy Ray not to do something is absolutely guaranteed to make him want to do exactly that!” opined Maybelle from the window. “Mr. Judson should have begged him to be a farmer and forbade his joining the army!”

  I shook my head in reproof, but I was smiling a little, and Bryan was staring at both of us as though we’d lost our minds.

  “How do you two know any of this?” he demanded.

  “Maybelle and I go shopping, we listen. We have the quilters over, and we listen; we go to the Ruehouse, we listen. And Maybelle is right, it might have prevented a lot of misery if Judson had forbidden Billy Ray to join the army, because he’d have done it, just to upset his father, and that would have at least removed him from Rueful. Now listen to what I say, Bryan! Mayleen’s exactly like him. If we say black, she says white. Our opposition would only make both of them that much more determined. That’s by the by, however.

  “What’s relevant is that Mr. Judson has already given property to the three children. He’s given Hanna some income property in Contrition City, and he’s given half the farm to each one of the boys. Billy Ray is eldest, he picked the land across the river with the house on it. It’s his, and the farm is big enough to support him and Mayleen.”

  “When did this happen?” Bryan demanded.

  “Billy Ray getting the farm? Over the past few months. Mayleen wants to marry him—no, I haven’t heard her say so, but I’ll wager Maybelle has.”

  “She’s right, Daddy. It’s all Mayleen talks about.”

  I nodded. “And if she’s pregnant, which I have no doubt she is, unless you’re capable of forcibly aborting her, Bryan, then locking her up in the attic for the next ten years, she’s going to manage being with Billy Ray, one way or another.”

  “And you accept this?” he asked angrily.

  “Accept it?” I, sighed, at a loss. As I’d accepted Rueful? As I’d accepted becoming his nurse? As I’d finally accepted that one of my children was born to misery. “What are our choices, Bryan? Tell me if we have any. I’d love to know.”

  He mumbled and grumbled to himself, gradually losing steam as his kettle cooled.

  I said, “There’s one good thing, Bryan. Our family here, Maybelle, and you and I, will be much, much happier with Mayleen married and living somewhere else. Ninety-nine percent of our upsets and problems are Mayleen.”

  Bryan said plaintively, “God, Margaret, she’s only sixteen!”

  “After the number of years we’ve lived in The Valley, you should know every man here believes if a girl is big enough, she’s old enough, and the ruing can come later!”

  Bryan, deflated, rubbed his forehead. “I didn’t foresee my own daughter being considered big enough.”

  “Well you can rue that come next Rueday. Maybelle and I’ll stand right beside you and rue it double.”

  “No, I won’t,” whispered Maybelle. “Because you’re right, Mama. We’ll be so much happier if she’s somewhere else. She just makes our lives a misery.”

  It was a mistake, of course. I had forecast Mayleen’s life, but I had not considered Mayleen’s children, all ten of them. Yet another mistake to add to the endless chain. Still, as I often tried to console myself years later, it was quite possible, given Mayleen’s stupidity and Billy Ray’s pigheadedness, nothing could have prevented it, even if I had known where it would lead.

  I Am Wilvia/on B’yurngrad

  On B’yurngrad, my years of study had come to an end. I was congratulated by my instructors and was honored by being summoned by the High Priestess for an interview concerning my future life. I had never been to the High Priestess’s office, which was known to be high in the dome of the Temple, between the outer shell of stone and metal and the inner shell of plaster and gilded tiles. One of the novices offered to guide me up the endless stairs that spiraled through echoing spaces above the Temple vault.

  “Does the High Priestess climb these stairs every day?” I asked, puffing slightly.

  “Wilvia, we don’t know,” said the novice, a woman even younger than my twenty years or so. “When she summons us, we climb up, and she’s there. If she doesn’t summon us, we don’t go, and we have no idea where she is.”

  We climbed farther. The stairs leveled into a ramp that curved gently upward to a wide door.

  “In there,” the novice said. “Knock first.”

  I knocked. A voice bade me enter, which I did, struggling with the weight of the door. The room was empty except for two chairs, one of them occupied by Lady Badness.

  “Well, come in, Wilvia. Don’t stand there gawking.”

  “I didn’t know you…how long have you…”

  “How long have I been head of this agglomeration? A very long time. Is it rewarding? Yes. Does it take a lot of my time? Not really. Your teachers are pleased with you.”

  I flushed. “They seem to be, yes. I’m surprised. The final examination was not at all as I expected it to be.”

  “The judging of cases. No. It’s never as we expect it to be. That’s why we train women judges here at Temple. It is the nature of men to make rules for everything and to play complicated games with them. For them, the game is more important than justice.

  “Ordinary people prefer justice. They prefer that things be taken case by case, they prefer an attempt at justice over the rules of law, for they know that pure law is often used by the clever to victimize the innocent. Sit down, child.”

  I lowered myself into the other chair. In the center of the room was an open well surrounded by a railing. I could hear the shush o
f footsteps and the murmur of voices far below in the Temple. Above, a similar hole pierced the dome to show the sky, where white birds darted across an infinite blue.

  Lady Badness spoke: “You have done what was required, learned what was necessary, and I have come to take you away.”

  “Away?” The word, leaving my mouth, sounded bruised and tentative. “But…Joziré will come here to find me…”

  “Joziré is waiting for you on Fajnard. His mother, the queen, has died, not at the hands of Frossian assassins as was feared, but from sorrow, an illness we do not know how to cure. Joziré must now take the throne. He wishes to do so with you at his side, if that will be good for his people. Will it, do you suppose?”

  “He never sent me word,” I cried angrily. “Never once…”

  “He could not have done so without risking his life and yours. Would you have wished him to do that?”

  I bit my tongue. “Lady Badness, no. I didn’t think.”

  “You will have to think if you marry Joziré, will your marrying him be good for his people?” repeated Lady Badness obdurately. “You marry them when you marry him.”

  Over the past five or so years, in those few moments when I had had time for reflection, I had asked myself this question many times.

  “I believe I will be good for his people,” I said firmly. “I will love them as I do him, and they will be my people.”

  She nodded, looking at me with what I thought might be sadness. Not joy, at any rate.

  “Then I must tell you what is forecast for the lovely lands of the Ghoss. They may soon be threatened, probably by either the Frossians or the Thongal. If that happens, you may need to leave your people, your country. You may need to leave Joziré, for his sake. You may have a long, troubled time in your life. You may know sadness, and sorrow, and loneliness. You may have to work very hard just to stay alive. Or, you can forget Joziré. You can stay here. It will be safer. You will be among friends. I think it is only fair to give you warning before you put your foot on the path…”