What Big Teeth

by Rose Szabo

  “Arthur,” said Grandma Persephone. “You remember Eleanor?”

  And the man whose back was turned stood up, unfolding himself from the chair in front of me.

  He was not astoundingly tall, but his thinness accentuated his height. He looked neither young nor old—he had no hair on his head, but also no wrinkles, aside from deep pleats in his lips that made him look stern. He wore a black suit in an old style with a celluloid collar and a pair of old-fashioned dark glasses, the kind with lenses on the sides, obscuring his eyes. His skin looked almost bloodless, but he didn’t seem sick. I noticed he kept one hand on the back of his chair, and a silver-handled cane was resting not far from his feet.

  He smiled without opening his mouth. “I suppose the real question is: Do you remember me?”

  “… Mr. Knox?” I ventured.

  “Please, call me Arthur.”

  I remembered someone of about his shape from my childhood. A dinner guest for the adults who had little to say to children. He drove an old Model T and sometimes parked it in our carriage house. At the time he’d seemed to me to be impossibly old and fusty, except when he’d—

  “You used to play piano,” I said, realization dawning. “I think you might have taught me how to play.”

  Grandma Persephone glanced over at him sharply, suddenly. His back was to her, so he didn’t see it. I remembered sitting next to him on the bench, learning scales on a sunny afternoon.

  “I might have,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  How was he so young? He didn’t look like he’d aged a day since I’d left. But maybe I’d been wrong back then; maybe he was just one of those young people who seemed old.

  He pulled out my chair for me, and when I sat in it, he settled me in closer to the table. I felt less afraid with him here. Not because he would protect me, but because he’d survived so long in the company of my family. That meant it was possible.

  I liked him instantly. There was something delicate about him that made me want to hold him too tightly, dig fingernails into him, bite into him to test his firmness. At the same time, he felt cool, self-contained, like my favorite teachers at Saint Brigid’s. I wanted to impress him.

  “What brings you by today?” I asked, hoping it sounded natural, the kind of question that adult people ask one another.

  “Your grandma didn’t get her taxes done on time.”

  Grandma Persephone rolled her eyes. “I pay them enough that you’d think they could wait.”

  “And, of course, you’ll stay for dinner,” Father said.

  Mr. Knox—Arthur—smiled tightly. “Of course.”

  I tried to concentrate on my breakfast, but I was aware of him in a way that reminded me of the feeling of someone standing just behind you. But every time I turned to try to talk to him, someone else already had his attention. Luma asked him about his car; Rhys wanted to show him how he could throw his spoon as high as the ceiling and then catch it in his teeth. Even Margaret, on her trips back and forth from the table to the kitchen, stopped muttering and looked at him fondly. Every time someone talked to him, he was courteous, charming. He didn’t eat, but sipped at a cup of coffee with a wry smile flickering around the corners of his mouth. At one point he saw me looking at him and, for a second, turned that smile on me, and I felt like someone had held a match up to the edge of me and lit me on fire. But when I started to open my mouth, Father was already asking him when they could play billiards.

  Finally, Grandpa Miklos pushed back his chair. “I am ready for some hunting.”

  “Father, you hunted yesterday,” my father said. “Don’t you think you’ll wear yourself out?”

  “The day I can’t hunt, I am not Miklos. Who’s coming?” Grandpa glanced hopefully at me.

  “I can’t,” I said. In the woods he’d kill me for sure.

  “You still can’t become the wolf? I hoped you would grow into it.”

  “Miklos, hush,” Grandma Persephone said. He shrugged and made a face at her. She giggled like a girl.

  “I’m going to stay in today,” Luma said. “You go, Daddy. Keep Grandpa company.”

  “Any requests?”

  “Postman?” Luma said, and everyone but me laughed. “But really, anything. You know I don’t mind.”

  “I’ll come.” Rhys stood up and stretched, flexing his shoulders until his sweater strained across his chest and pulled up to show his flat belly downed in dark hair. “See you later, Arthur.”

  “Luma, why don’t you want to go with your cousin?” Grandma Persephone asked.

  Luma laughed and combed her hair behind her ear with a long-taloned hand.

  “I want to spend time with Eleanor,” she said.

  The hunters—Father, Grandpa Miklos, and Rhys—left, jostling their way out of the dining room. Persephone half waved at them before turning to Arthur. “Let’s get this over with,” she said.

  Arthur picked up his cane and rested his weight on it while he waited for her. I looked at his legs, wondering what ailed him, or if he was simply older than I’d thought. He saw me looking and gave me a covert smile. How had I not remembered him? Maybe I’d been too young to notice someone so subtle. Now, he was all I could see.

  “I’m going upstairs to play,” Luma said. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Aren’t you a little old for that?” I said without thinking, wanting to sound mature in front of Arthur. But Luma scowled at me, and I instantly felt sorry.

  “If you think so, you don’t have to come,” she said. She turned and flounced up the stairs.

  “We’ll see you later, Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said. And then she and Arthur were gone, and I was alone.

  I thought about going up and apologizing to Luma. But what would I say? That I’d snapped at her to impress our grandmother’s accountant? It sounded silly, even to me. And she barely knew me now. What would she even say, if I tried to apologize? What if she didn’t care?

  I tried to forget the whole conversation, and looked around the house for things to amuse myself. But as the morning turned into afternoon in the big empty house, I realized I was bored. I sat and read a book in the front parlor for a while, a dark red room with a big fireplace and heavy rugs, and played chess with myself until I realized I couldn’t remember all the rules. I pulled the dust cloth off of the piano and tried out some scales.

  I could still smell the sea on the breeze and a part of me wanted to go to the water, but I was afraid of it—I hadn’t swum in eight years. Maybe the ocean was now just another thing that wanted to kill me. And once from the woods I heard a series of quick barks, and then a wild creature screamed in a way that reminded me it wasn’t safe to leave the house.

  Finally, I went up to my room, where I squinted at myself in the fly-specked mirror and tried to make myself change my shape, like Rhys and Luma did. What did it feel like, to change? How would I know if I was close?

  I thought of a way of making up with Luma. I crept down the hall and knocked on her door. “Hello?” I called out. I opened the door a crack and saw her sitting on a low chair with her back to the door. “Luma, I have an important question and I really need your help.”

  She didn’t turn around from her vanity, where she sat brushing her hair. But she nodded at herself in the mirror, and I knew she was pleased.

  “Well,” she said. “Don’t stand in the door. Come in.”

  While my room seemed like storage for old furniture, hers was all matched: white bed, white dresser, white vanity with an enormous mirror. That whole wall was lined with mirrors of all shapes and sizes. There was a copy of Rebecca tented open on her bed, and a smattering of lipsticks around it, and Jane Eyre bookmarked with a sheet of false eyelashes on the bedside table on top of a tattered book that said Birds of North America. At Saint Brigid’s you weren’t supposed to read more than one book at a time. It was considered lax. I sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and tried to figure out how to ask her what it felt like to change your shape.

&n
bsp; “It’s a bit like turning yourself inside out,” Luma said, after I tried asking three or four different ways. “Or like turning your insides into a disguise, and then tucking your disguise into your insides.”

  “It’s like a disguise?” I said. “It seems a little more complicated than that.”

  “It’s…” She left the brushing and rummaged in the toy box she still kept beside her bed. I felt embarrassed for her. She came out with a cloth doll in a long dress.

  “Flip up her skirt,” she ordered, and, still not understanding, I did. Underneath was another head and torso of a doll. The skirt, turned inside out, was a different color. The doll, upside down, a different woman.

  “It’s like that,” she said. “Only faster.”

  I looked at Luma, in her white slip with her layers of blotted pink and red lipsticks staining her sharp teeth. I tried to imagine where the other creature was.

  “Why does it bother you?” she asked. “It didn’t used to. You could always keep up anyway.” She pulled up the sleeve of her robe and showed me a ring of white scars on her forearm. “You bit harder than any of us, too.”

  The scars stared at me accusingly, as pearly as a set of baby teeth. I wanted to put my own teeth up against them, to prove by size and angle that they weren’t mine.

  “Oh, Luma,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m fine!” she said, and I felt even worse. What kind of sister had I been? “It wasn’t so bad. At least you don’t have teeth like us.”

  “I guess I take after Mother.”

  She laughed. “But she’s so quiet!” she said. “You know, I think she said something once about you being a bit like her mother. And then I asked her what she meant and she said she couldn’t tell me.”

  “Her mother?”

  “Our other grandmother, silly. She lives in France, I think. Mother writes a letter every year at Christmas.”

  “Have you seen her?” I felt a little kindling of hope. “Maybe I am like her.”

  “I always imagined she’d be like Mother, only all over,” Luma said. I winced.

  From downstairs I heard a door creak open. Grandma Persephone’s voice filtered up through the front hall, and Arthur’s, too. I’d forgotten he was going to eat with us.

  “Can I borrow something pretty to wear?” I asked. “And maybe you could do my hair?”

  She looked at me strangely then. “Why?”

  “I just want to try something different,” I said. “I’ve worn a uniform for a long time now.”

  She tilted her head. “That’s sad,” she said. “Sit down.”

  She arranged me in front of her mirror and began taking down my hair. It was nearly the same color as hers, but somehow hers was lustrous, and mine a faded grayish white that made me look old.

  “What’s this?” she asked, touching the back of my neck. It stung.

  “Ow!” I said.

  “It looks like someone pulled out a chunk of your hair back here.” She looked me over. “And you’re bruised, too. What happened to you?”

  I thought of Lucy Spencer gripping my hair, yanking on it, trying to hold me back. My face burned. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I got in a fight at school.”

  She tutted.

  “Well, you’re home now,” she said. “If anyone comes after you, I’ll eat them up.” And then she giggled and hummed as she began brushing my hair. In her own room, she seemed wise, knowing. She was a few years older than me, but we’d always switched like this, taking turns being the older sister. I used to like it, but now I was suddenly unsure of my footing.

  “Let’s make you lovely,” she said.

  I didn’t feel lovely, even in the frilly dress I borrowed from her. On her, I’m sure it looked elegant, voluptuous; it sagged on me like a sack, so that I looked like a little girl in a nightgown, and I ended up putting my school uniform back on. But my hair was nice the way she’d done it, in braids coiled around my head. She made me turn around and started dabbing creams onto her wrist, and then smudging them onto my cheeks and eyes. As she worked, a savory smell drifted up the stairs from the kitchen. They’d caught something, then.

  “Why didn’t you come home sooner?” she asked, tilting my mouth open and swiping a little lipstick on with her pinky finger. She frowned at it and reached for a handkerchief to wipe it off. “No. You’re such a strange color. Almost green.”

  “They wouldn’t let me come home,” I said.

  “Funny,” she said. “Grandma told me you were too busy.”

  She licked her hand and used the spit to smooth back the flyaways at my hairline. I winced. “She lied. I wasn’t busy.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t see why she had to be lying. Maybe you were too busy and you just didn’t know it.”

  “Busy eating plain toast for breakfast? Busy trying to make friends so the other girls wouldn’t pour water on my bed while I was sleeping? I learned Latin, I suppose, but I could have done that here.” I sighed. “I don’t know.”

  Luma’s eyes went wide. “That sounds awful. Why didn’t you kill them?”

  I started. “Because that’s wrong!” I said, and then thought of Lucy, and felt a sick guilt in my stomach. “They were terrible, but not that terrible.”

  She cocked her head to one side and seemed about to say something, when Grandma Persephone called from downstairs that it was time for dinner.

  “She should get a bell,” I said, as we made our way to the staircase. “There’s no way everyone heard that.”

  From behind us I heard a clattering of toenails on bare wood, and in a blur, Rhys came rocketing down the stairs past us on four legs, his black pelt glistening as he leaped clear over the last several steps. He skidded around a corner into the hall closet below, and emerged a few moments later on two legs, pulling a sweater on over his head and then reaching down to button his pants.

  And then he did something strange. He stopped in front of the speckled mirror in the front hall and licked his palm. Carefully, he smoothed his gleaming black hair back from his forehead, the way Luma had just done to me. He turned left and right, watching his own reflection, rolling his shoulders back and sticking his hands in his pockets just so before he crossed the threshold into the dining room.

  As soon as he was out of sight, I turned to Luma. “I don’t remember him ever caring what he looked like,” I said. It wasn’t in his character. Rhys was a predator, sleek and unstoppable. It was strange to see him pouting at himself.

  “I don’t know who he’s fooling,” Luma said. “He’s been trying to impress Arthur ever since he came home for the summer.”

  “Impress him? Why?”

  “If you ask me, it’s very childish,” she said, and she flounced down after him. But I noticed that when she came to the hall mirror, she stopped, too. I hung back, watching as she curled a strand of hair around the tip of her finger, and then unspooled it so that it hung down alongside her face.

  I was the last one in, and everyone else had already taken seats: Grandma Persephone at the head, with Miklos next to her, which surprised me since I’d assumed they’d sit in the same place every time. Mother was again in her barrel at the foot of the table. Luma and Rhys jostled for a seat opposite Arthur, and in the chaos I slipped into the seat beside him, unnoticed. Margaret came in bearing an enormous tray loaded with cuts of rare venison: loins, steaks, something I couldn’t identify. Grandpa Miklos speared it with the carving fork and brandished it at me. “Little one, you should have the heart.”

  I froze. The heart on the fork quivered, and Grandpa Miklos looked confused, then sad. Finally, Rhys snatched it off the end of the fork with both hands. Grandpa grunted indulgently. And with that, dinnertime descended.

  The air filled with the gnashing of teeth and the clink of fork tines on china. Grandpa Miklos shoved his whole face into the dish, scarfing up the tender bits and licking the plate clean with a tongue that seemed too big for his mouth. I ate slowly, the way they’d taught me in school, and watched the ca
rnage from the corner of my eye. It was a little easier than breakfast had been, but I still felt that I could be next.

  I glanced sideways at Arthur. He seemed to be smiling a little. I realized that he wasn’t eating, just pushing food around his plate and occasionally slipping pieces of it into a napkin in his lap. I felt mortified.

  “I’m sorry they’re like this,” I whispered to him over the chomps and satisfied snarls. “This would put anyone off eating.”

  He turned his head to me, looking perplexed.

  “I’ve dined enough times with the Zarrins to know what to expect,” he said. “You can’t sit down to table with the wolf and not see a mauling.”

  “But you aren’t eating,” I said. “I’ll ask them to use some table manners.”

  He snorted, and then composed himself. “You’re very kind,” he said. “But believe me when I say that this has nothing to do with the Zarrins’ table manners.”

  I kept eating, bringing small forkfuls of venison to my mouth, but I watched Arthur out of the corner of my eye. I watched the way he tilted his head at the family, in … affection? Concern? It was hard to say.

  “You seem to like them,” I said. The cloud of noise made me feel like we were alone at the table, the only ones not scarfing down food with wild abandon. “Or you seem amused by them, maybe. Aren’t you afraid?”

  He raised his eyebrows, and I was happy to think that maybe I’d surprised him.

  “Afraid?” he said. “No, not for a long time now, anyway. There have been times I’ve been furious with them. Or not wanted to see them at all. But I think I will miss them, when it’s all said and done.”