Frog Music

by Emma Donoghue

  Black antlerish handlebars, that’s all she has time to glimpse before the gigantic spokes are swallowing her skirts. Her scream seems to break the bicycle in two. Machine explodes one way and rider another, smashing Blanche to the ground.

  She tries to spring up but her right leg won’t bear her. Mouth too dry to spit.

  The lanky daredevil jumps up, rubbing one elbow, as lively as a clown. “Ça va, mademoiselle?”

  The fellow’s observant enough to read Blanche’s nationality from her style of dress. And the accent is as French as Blanche’s own. But the voice—

  Not a man’s, Blanche realizes. Not a boy’s, even. This is a girl, for all the gray jacket, vest, pants, the jet hair hacked above the sunburned jawline. One of these eccentrics on whom the City prides itself—which only aggravates Blanche’s irritation, as if the whole collision were nothing but a gag, and never mind who’s left with merde on her hem.

  A cart swerves around Blanche, hooves close enough to make her flinch. She gets up onto her knees, but she’s hobbled by her skirt.

  The young woman in pants holds out a hand, teeth flashing in a grin.

  Blanche slaps it away. For this female to run her down and then smirk about it—

  A long screech of brakes: another horsecar at the crossing, bearing down on them. The stranger offers her hand again, with a theatrical flourish. Blanche grabs hold of the cool fingers and wrenches herself to her feet, hearing a seam rip under one arm. She staggers to the sidewalk, her skewed bustle bulging over one hip.

  As she shakes out her aching right leg, she realizes she’s alone. The daredevil’s run half a block up Kearny and is roaring in English at some gamins who’ve seized their chance to make off with her fancy machine. Serves her right if it’s gone!

  But by the time Blanche has hauled her bustle straight and slapped the dirt from her skirts, the rider’s back. Perched above the gigantic front wheel, she glides down the street to Blanche, then swings one leg over, hops down, and hits the ground running. “Jenny Bonnet,” she announces as if it’s good news, the accent thoroughly American now even if she says her surname in the French way, with a silent t. She tips her black hat to a natty angle. “And you are?”

  “None of your business.” Blanche blows at the strand of hair that’s stuck to her damp lip and summons her crispest English, because what she lacks in height she can make up for in hauteur. “Listen, you he-she-whatever, the next time you get the notion to make the street your playground—”

  “Yeah, this thing’s the devil to steer,” interrupts Jenny Bonnet, nodding as if they agree. She has only about six inches on Blanche, up close. “Didn’t hurt you, though, did I?”

  Blanche bristles. “I’m bruised from head to toe.”

  “No bones sticking out, though?” The young woman makes a show of looking her up and down, mugging for a laugh. “No actual bloodshed per se?”

  “You might have killed us both, imbecile.”

  “If it comes to that, I might have fallen off a steamer to Lima this morning, and you might have caught your death,” says Jenny, jerking her thumb at a smallpox flag on a tobacconist’s just behind them.

  Blanche jerks back and takes a few steps away.

  “Instead, it appears we’re both safe and sound, and so’s my high-wheeler.” Jenny lets out a cowboy whoop.

  And oddly enough, Blanche’s wrath begins to lift a little. Maybe it’s the whisper of a breeze rising off the Bay, where the masts of the quarantined junks and clippers seem to be swaying a little, unless that’s a trick of the dusk. Or the soft trill from a flute player in some apartment overhead. The lights are flaring on in the cafés and shops along Kearny, and soon Chinatown’s border will be as glittering as a carousel.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” suggests Jenny, nodding toward Durand’s brasserie.

  Blanche always likes the sound of that. “As an apology?”

  “If you like. Never found them worth the candle myself.”

  Blanche hoists her eyebrows.

  “If you’re sorry, folks can tell,” remarks Jenny. “No use piling on the verbiage.” She lays her bicycle flat outside the brasserie’s door and beckons a boy over to guard it.

  “Do you reckon this kid won’t run off with it as fast as the others did?” asks Blanche, sardonic.

  “Ah, I know where this one lives.”

  That disconcerts Blanche. “I never imagine them as living anywhere in particular.”

  Jenny nods up at the building’s rickety overhang: “He’s a Durand.”

  As the two of them step into the garlicky fug, a couple of customers glance up, but nobody gives the young woman in pants a second glance. This Jenny must be an habitué.

  Monsieur Durand greets her with a nod and clears a space at the bar with his elbows. His fat mustache is leaking wax as he comes back and slaps down their glasses and a carafe of wine. Blanche pours the wine, takes a long drink. Ah, that’s better. She wipes sweat out of her eyes. “Aren’t you sweltering under all those layers?”

  A shrug as Jenny fills her own glass.

  “September can’t come too soon for me. It has to cool down by then.”

  “The City’s the exception to any rule,” says Jenny. “I’ve known it to be hottest in October.”

  Blanche groans at the prospect.

  Durand returns with two bowls of cuisses de grenouille au beurre noir they didn’t ask for. Discovering that she’s hungry, Blanche rips the firm, aromatic flesh from the frog thighs. “These aren’t like back in France.”

  “No, they’re better,” Jenny counters. She lets out a grunt of pleasure as she chews. “Only ten minutes dead, that’s the trick. But a touch too salty. Tell him he’s still oversalting,” she throws at Durand.

  The owner thumbs his mustache off his unsmiling mouth. “Portal,” he roars over his shoulder.

  “How long have you been here?” Jenny asks Blanche.

  “Since the winter before last.”

  “So why’ve you stayed?”

  Blanche blinks at the question. “You have no manners, miss.”

  “Oh, I’ve got some,” says Jenny, “they’re just not what you might call pretty. Diamond in the rough, that’s me.”

  Blanche rolls her eyes. “And why shouldn’t I have stayed, may I ask?”

  “Most move on through,” observes Jenny. “As if the City’s just a mouth, swallowing them whole, and the rest of America’s the belly where they end up.”

  Blanche winces at the image and pours herself more wine. California was Arthur’s choice, she recalls. Blanche couldn’t have found it on a map. All the French they got into conversations with on the ship were heading, like Arthur and Blanche and Ernest, to some big city—New York or Chicago if not San Francisco—where, it was said, the hospitality and entertainment trades paid well. “We came because we heard you can cock your hat as you please here,” she says, “and stayed for the same reason, I suppose.”

  “Who’s we?”

  But Blanche has had enough of this style of questioning. “And you, when did you arrive?”

  “Portal!” roars Durand again.

  “I was three,” says Jenny, neat teeth nibbling her last frog leg, “but even then I was choosy about my food.”

  “What are you now?”

  “Still choosy.”

  “No,” says Blanche, “I mean—”

  A chuckle. “Twenty-seven.”

  Really? “Huh. That’s three years older than me, and I still look pretty fresh.”

  Jenny grins back at her, neither agreeing nor contradicting.

  “It must be your outfit,” says Blanche with a sigh, nodding at the pants. “It’s as odd as all get-out, but it does take years off you.”

  They’re bantering as if they’ve always known each other, it occurs to Blanche with a prickle of unease. She’s not one for making friends with women, as a rule.

  A mournful face looks through the hatch from the kitchen, and Durand snaps at him, “Ease up on the salt, Jeanne say
s.”

  This must be Portal. The cook makes a small, obscene gesture in Jenny’s direction.

  “You know I’m right, mon vieux,” she tells Portal.

  “Stick to swamp-wading.” He mops his forehead with his sleeve and disappears again.

  “So come on now,” says Jenny to Blanche, greedily, “who are you and what’s your story?”

  “Hold on. Swamp-wading?” Blanche repeats.

  “I caught these last night, out by Lake Merced,” Jenny tells her, holding up a glistening bone.

  “That’s your trade? Hunting frogs?” Well, it would go some way to explain the young woman’s getup. “Don’t they give you warts?”

  “That’s pure dumb superstition.” Jenny offers her small hands for examination.

  They’re brown but smooth. “Couldn’t you work at something … I don’t know, less disgusting?”

  “Guess I don’t disgust easy,” says Jenny. “The City has three hundred restaurants, and all the French and Chinese ones need frogs.”

  “But they’re such ugly, clumsy creatures.”

  “Clumsy? You ever seen them swim?”

  Now that she thinks about it, Blanche realizes she’s never seen a live frog except on sale in barrels on Dupont Street. “But the smell, the slime—”

  “That’s fish you’re thinking of. Frogs don’t smell of anything,” Jenny corrects her, “and without a touch of slipperiness, you can’t have it both ways.”

  “Both ways?”

  “Live on land and in water as well. I call that crafty.”

  Blanche purses her mouth. “That’s my glass you’re drinking from, by the way.”

  Jenny blinks at it. “Sorry.” She gestures to Durand for another.

  “An apology at last,” marvels Blanche under her breath, satirical.

  When the proprietor slaps a clean glass down in front of her, she refills it and strips the last shred of garlicky meat from a delicate bone with her teeth. “Since you’ve drunk from my glass,” she tells Jenny, “you should be able to read my thoughts. Except you’d probably call that more dumb superstition.”

  Jenny furrows her brow. “Your name is Patience Vautrien … and you’re a dairymaid.”

  Blanche makes a small sound of outrage. Those girls are known for their reek. “I did once work with horses,” she says. A fact, if a misleading one.

  “But not anymore?” Jenny presses her temples, frowning with effort. “Mrs. Hector Losange, mother of five lovely offspring, known for her charity teas?” She waits. “Arabella Delafrance, lady spy?”

  “Enough!” The joke suddenly sours on Blanche. As if it’s not as clear as day from her flowered bodice, fuchsia skirt, and general gaudiness that she’s a showgirl, at least, and probably on the town.

  Why should she care who knows? If Blanche didn’t want to be recognized for what she was, she wouldn’t dress this way, would she? She never exactly intended to be a soiled dove (that curious euphemism), but neither can she remember putting up any real objection. She stepped into the life like a swimmer entering a lake, a few inches at a time.

  “So where did you grow up,” she asks, to change the subject, “America’s belly or mouth?”

  “Some gristly part, anyway,” Jenny jokes instead of answering.

  “How much?” asks a man at Blanche’s shoulder.

  She decides to assume he’s addressing Durand. “Have you family?” she presses on.

  “Found under a cabbage leaf, I was,” says Jenny, deadpan.

  “I said, how much?” The American is breathing right in Blanche’s ear, and she can smell the chaw in his mouth.

  “I’m eating,” she says without looking around.

  “Only asking a civil question.” The big man squeezes up to the bar between the two women, dark wheels of sweat under his arms.

  “You’re bothering the lady,” mentions Jenny.

  He turns to look her up and down. “You reckon I can’t afford her?” Jingling coins in his pocket. “Because for your information, I could hire six of this slut”—jerking his thumb at Blanche—“with change to spare.”

  “As the fellow says,” Jenny remarks, “better keep your mouth shut and seem stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”

  The last thing Blanche wants is a quarrel. Across his bulk, she frowns furiously at Jenny.

  “You calling me stupid?” asks the fellow after a second’s delay, reddening as he shifts his quid of tobacco to the other cheek.

  “A leather-headed lunk of the highest order,” says Jenny pleasantly.

  He presents his fist for inspection, inches from her face. “Somebody ought to teach you to keep your nose out of other folks’ business, girlie.”

  “My friend Mr. Colt here would not concur.” Jenny slides her jacket aside to show a tapering shape in her trouser leg.

  Blanche is off her stool and an arm’s length away, butter dripping. Absurdly, she wishes she’d picked up her napkin to wipe her mouth.

  “Oh,” growls the American, “you’ve got nothing on you that impresses me, you, you puny—goddamn morphodite!”

  Durand has finally noticed what’s brewing. “Dehors,” he roars, pointing toward the door.

  Jenny hops down from the stool, a Harlequin in a pantomime.

  The American follows obediently, but when Jenny holds the door for him with flip courtesy, he backhands her into the wall. The crack of the young woman’s skull against a faded print of the Champs-Elysées makes even the most dogged drinkers glance up.

  “Monsieur Durand!” protests Blanche.

  But the owner only raises his eyes to heaven.

  Jenny, with the look of a stunned calf, bends to retrieve her hat. The print falls to the floor with a tinkle of glass. And now the connard has her wrist behind her back and he’s marching her out, using her shoulder to shove the door open.

  Blanche races out after them, yanks at his arm: “Have you no shame, whaling on a female like some brute?”

  The American flicks her against the wall.

  Struggling for breath, clutching her side, Blanche curses her size. At times like this she feels like some fairy in a world of trolls.

  The man has dropped Jenny on the sidewalk. Is he going to stave her ribs in, stamp on her head?

  Blanche lets out a wail.

  No, he just lands a squirt of brown juice on Jenny and slouches off down the street. Without a second glance at Blanche, she notices—which tells her it was a row more than a woman that he was itching for all along.

  She leans on the windowsill of the brasserie, dizzy. The leg bruised by the bicycle wobbles under her, and her ribs throb. Nothing’s broken, though. Blanche has enough experience to know that.

  Kearny Street is humming around them, burners and reflectors multiplying the light of oil lamps in every storefront. Drinkers shuffle arm in arm from bar to bar, bawling dirty choruses. Knots of men head for the bordels on Commercial or Pacific to sample Jewesses, Mexicans, black girls, Orientals (though they’ll still pay highest for French, Blanche thinks with a certain satisfaction). A river of faces, festively red-eyed, as if they’ve given up even trying to sleep till the heat breaks. Smallpox be damned, nobody’s staying in tonight.

  Jenny sits up and lifts her sharp chin with an attempt at a grin. Her face is swelling already: a dark-edged cut below the left eyebrow. She turns aside and pukes her supper neatly into the gutter.

  How the evening’s complicated itself. Blanche should just walk away, right now, from this gun-packing jester who’s caused her damage twice in as many hours. Life in the City by the Bay is demanding enough without the company of someone who runs toward risk like a child to bonbons.

  But she lets out a long breath. The fact is, Blanche hasn’t had so much fun with a stranger since—well, since leaving France, and farther back than that. Their little circle in San Francisco is—as it was in Paris—composed of Blanche, Arthur, Ernest, and whoever the two men bring home. Blanche can’t think of another acquaintance she’s formed as fast (and
on her own) as tonight’s with Jenny Bonnet. Such a strange sense of familiarity and ease along with the novelty. “You should slap a bit of meat on that eye,” she advises.

  A derisory grunt from Jenny.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  What a one for secrets this young woman is. “Come on, let’s get you home,” says Blanche, holding out her hand.

  “Fact is,” says Jenny, clambering to her feet, “I’m only out a week.”

  Out? Out of … ah, doesn’t that just take the cake: a jailbird. “What were you in for?”

  “Oh, the usual. ‘Appearing in the apparel of the other sex,’” quotes Jenny in a pompous voice.

  Blanche frowns. Can that be an actual crime? “Well, if this outfit gets you arrested,” she asks with a hint of impatience, “what makes you keep putting it back on?”

  “It suits me,” says Jenny.

  So deadpan that Blanche doesn’t register the pun until a second later. This young woman’s spirits sure revive fast. “You must be lodging somewhere,” Blanche persists.

  “Been high-wheeling, mostly,” says Jenny.

  Zooming along on that contraption, day and night? “What, you sleep on the wing like some seabird?”

  “I take naps in parks or theaters, or on a friend’s sofa when I feel the need,” Jenny concedes.

  There’s blood trickling onto the woman’s collar, Blanche notices now, and a trace of vomit on her chin. Blanche lets out a small groan. After all, it was for her sake, out of some kind of misguided gallantry, that this curious female got herself beat up. “Come on. I’m just a step away, on Sacramento Street.”

  “Lady, what makes you think you have to—”