Okay, he looked about as comfortable as he was likely to get with a broken arm. I turned his music on for him—it was jazz. Then I wrote one more thing on the notepad. “Cy,” I told him, “here’s my number.” I left it beside the cordless phone. “If you need anything, you call me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I mean it. You call me. Promise?”
He smiled wide and warm. “Okay, Dusie. You sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite, now.”
Cy isss sssweet, remarked a corn snake, his thought tasting like sunrise and dew.
Cy isss nice, agreed a garter snake.
You guys are right for once, I thought as I let myself out of Cy’s apartment.
“Dusie,” he called after me, “I’ll be absolutely all right. Don’t worry.”
But I did worry. All the way home and then some.
EIGHT
Mom was waiting for me, all dressed up in washable silk as usual, silk boots, silk turban, looking hissy enough to spit. “Dusie, it’s almost bedtime! Why didn’t you have your cell phone turned on? I called and called. Where have you been?”
“Nowhere.” I felt real mixed up about everything, and I didn’t want to talk to her.
“What do you mean, nowhere? You must have been somewhere.”
“Nowhere in particular.”
“Dusie Gorgon, did you go back to see that boy in the hospital?”
“No!” I started to get mad. Mom ought to know I keep my promises.
“Good,” she said. “Then where were you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does! I want to know—”
“Why?”
She actually stamped her foot, and I noticed her turban was moving. When I was a little kid, Mom always used to hold down her turban with both hands when she got mad, and now I knew why. Her turban jumped as she yelled, “Because I worry about you!”
“What for?”
“All the things mothers usually worry about!” Her voice had gone about an octave higher than usual, and her turban was practically dancing. But my snakes stayed oddly quiet. They didn’t hiss. They didn’t mutter predator. They didn’t seem to want to diss my mother at all.
Mom raved on. “I worry that you’re depressed, unhappy. I worry that you’re at some unsupervised party drinking liquor or doing drugs. I worry that you’ve run away with some boy—”
“Ha,” I said. “That’ll be the day.” I could just see me getting all kissy-face with some boy as he patted my snakes. Right.
Mom said, “Dusie, you’re so different all of a sudden.” Everything about her went slack and quiet within a moment. She said almost in a whisper, “You’re so hard. You don’t let me in anymore. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on.”
With her voice wavering a little she said, “I was worried you might have jumped off a bridge.”
She was being stupid, yet that quiver in her voice made my heart hurt so bad I wanted to cry on her shoulder. But at the same time I felt mad enough to scream, because everything was all her fault, obviously. Why did she have to be a gorgon?
Like she could hear me thinking she said, “I know it’s hard, but honey, I’ve been through the same thing. Let me help you. Please.”
“Oh, get over yourself!” I turned my back on her, went to my room, and whammed the door shut. Too late I realized I was starving, but my pride wouldn’t let me go back out once I’d slammed the door. I didn’t get any supper that night.
The next morning I made up for it by eating a huge breakfast. Two bowls of granola and then I went through the fridge like a vacuum cleaner. I ate cold chicken cordon bleu, cold stromboli, a jar of bacon bits, cold rice pilaf, a block of Philadelphia brand cream cheese, cold stuffed pasta shells with spicy Italian sausage, and some other leftovers I didn’t even recognize. Mom walked in and out of the kitchen where I was having my feeding frenzy. She looked at me sometimes, but she was real quiet. Well, so what. It was morning. Nobody wants to talk in the morning.
Sssome of usss do, remarked the pine woods snake.
Turtle eggsss? asked a king snake. Dusssie, how about sssome turtle eggsss?
Or nice fresh sssalamandersss? begged a garter snake.
“Ew!” I managed to make myself stop eating, grabbed a floppy hat, and left without yelling goodbye to Mom.
I headed straight to Cy’s apartment. It wasn’t much later than eight in the morning when I rang his doorbell. But he didn’t answer.
Okay, I told myself, he’s okay. Probably he was still at the hospital getting his X-ray. I sat on the concrete steps of his apartment building to wait. “Brrr,” I said to nobody in particular, because it was a chilly day and under my butt the steps felt as cold as a vice-principal’s heart.
If you humansss would hibernate like sssensssible creaturesss, you wouldn’t have thessse problemsss, said the scarlet king snake, warm and mouthy under my hat.
Dusssie, whined a corn snake, tell usss a ssstory.
“We’ve been through this before, guys.” I didn’t feel like calling them creeps anymore. “I don’t tell stories.” But all of a sudden I thought of one that might interest them. “Wait a minute. Whoa. Wait. Oh, wow. Okay, I’ll tell you the story of how the first woman and the first man got kicked out of the Garden of Eden.”
I told it to them by talking but also in my mind, trying to make pictures for them in my head, and I don’t know how well I did, because I’m, like, a city girl. I’d never been anyplace very Edenish. I pictured the Garden kind of like Central Park if you let the Bronx Zoo loose in it. But I guess I did okay, because the snakes were quiet, taking it in, as I told about God making Adam and Eve out of clay. I imagined God as real old like Cy but a lot stronger, and Adam as kind of Troy grown up with a beard, and I should have gone straight on to Eve, but I had a stray thought about Adam naming the animals—
What namesss? demanded a king snake, interrupting.
“Huh?”
What sssort of namesss? Now it was a chorus. Milk snakes, racers, the indigo snake, all of them.
I didn’t see what the big deal was. Like talking to kindergarteners, I said, “If it was a cat, he named it ‘cat.’ If—”
The smooth green snake interrupted. Did he name me Opheodrysss vernalisss vernalisss or Eassstern Sssmooth Green Sssnake or Cricker-Hunter or ssserpent or just sssnake?
“Oh. Um, I really don’t know. Just snake, I guess. Can we get back to the story?”
I kept it up with the pictures in my mind as I told them how animals weren’t enough company for Adam, so God made Eve. Okay, I guess I imagined Eve as a lot like me, only with hair instead of snakes. Anyway, the Tree of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was kind of a World Tree with all kinds of fruit on it and all kinds of birds in it. I’d got my idea of the World Tree from the story the smooth green snake had showed us. And the devil tempting Eve was a huge serpent spiraled around the trunk of the World Tree. I tried to make him mud-brown and ugly but somehow he ended up rainbow striped, all colors, kind of iridescent, with a blunt, handsome snaky face and human eyes. He said, “Eve, eat this, and you’ll know everything,” and she was like Cy with all his books, hungry to know the whole world, not just Eden. So she did, she ate the fruit, which was a banana, don’t ask me why, and she was nice enough to share with Adam. Then for some reason they wanted to stop being naked and put clothes on. I didn’t know what fig leaves looked like, so the birds flew down from the World Tree and gave them feathers to wear. Then God got all bent out of shape because they were messing with the way he’d organized things, and the angel with the flaming sword chased them out of the Garden, and that was why people were supposed to hate snakes, because a snake got them kicked out of Eden.
The story was over, but Cy wasn’t home yet.
But the ssserpent gave them knowledge and wisssdom, complained one of my black racers in a rainy blue tone. What’sss the problem?
“They did what God said not to.”
Ssserpents don’t alwaysss do what they’re told.
I didn’t answer, because I saw a taxicab coming.
Eden sssounds like basssking in the sssun, said the corn snake who had started me telling the story. Nice at firssst, but then boring.
The taxicab pulled up to the curb, and Cy got out, smiling at me like neon, his clothes rumpled but the brand-new cast on his arm looking all starchy and white. “I stopped at the library,” he said to explain why he was late. And here came the taxicab driver with an armload of books. On herpetology.
All formal like a diplomat Cy said, “Dusie, if you will permit me, I would like to offer you my assistance in the matter of the snakes.”
“What was it the Sphinx said again?” Cy asked me.
“Um, to lose my snakes I had to win, and to win I had to loosen. Or something like that.” Sitting at his table with him, I watched him reading some humongous book on mythology. “Do you know what it means?”
He shook his head. “You?”
“I have no clue.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled like he’d thought of a joke. “But Dusie, it says here that women with serpents for hair have magical powers and are full of wisdom and guile.”
“What’s guile?”
“Smarts. Like Odysseus had. The Greeks admired brains. Their goddess of wisdom, Athena …” But then Cy frowned. “On the other hand, almost all their monsters were women. I can’t make much sense of this.”
No wonder. I got bored just looking at him trying to read it.
“Cy,” I asked, “were you married?”
He glanced up from the fat book and smiled. “You know I had children. Three of them.”
“Okay, stupid question.” I mean, back when Cy was young, you probably had to get married to have kids. “How long were you married?”
“Forty-four years.”
“Wow.”
My snakes acted bored, too; maybe they were sleeping. Anyway, they were quiet on my head. I didn’t have to wear a hat when I was with Cy, which was a relief. He liked to look at my snakes, studying them like a professor. Cy thought that if he learned enough about mythology or science or biochemistry or something, he could help me get rid of my snakes somehow. I felt kind of weirded out about the whole thing. I mean, I’d kind of gotten used to my snakes by then. But I liked it that Cy was trying to help me. But I didn’t really hate my snakes anymore. But it made sense that I had to get rid of them if I could. But I didn’t think any of Cy’s books would help.
But Cy did. He had it all planned out. First he would help me, and then he would concentrate on helping Troy. His reasoning was that if he helped me get rid of my snakes first, then when he cured Troy, there would be no incriminating evidence on my head in case Troy said something. Cy seemed absolutely sure he could rescue me and Troy if he just put his mind to it. I didn’t really think he could, but I spent a lot of time at his apartment anyway, keeping him company and doing little things for him, like fastening buttons, opening a carton of milk or a bag of chips, dumb stuff that it’s hard to do with a broken arm. His other friends, college kids, came to help him at night, but I had the day shift. I got to do his laundry. And open his mail for him. Stuff like that.
Just as I thought he’d forgotten I was there, he said, “It’s been twenty years since Alina died.”
“Your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Were you in love?”
He gave me that glance again, wise and amused. “Hard to live with someone for forty-four years and not love them.”
“Yes, but were you ever in love?”
“Oh, yes.” His look got far away for a moment, then came back to me like a shot. “Do you worry about finding someone to love, Dusie?”
I felt myself blush. I mean, I hated to think it was that obvious. But yeah, even before the snakes, I’d always felt like I wasn’t pretty enough or flirty enough or something. I mean, to get a boyfriend, it’s all about clothes and clear skin and makeup and stuff, right? And hair. So, like, now … my heart felt so hollow that I managed to say the truth. “Nobody’s ever going to love me with these snakes on my head.”
Cy said, “I beg to differ. I am not even a herpetologist, Dusie, but if I were seventy years younger, I’d be on my knees to you this very moment.”
I blushed so hard it felt like sunburn, and I blurted, “Why, for gosh sake?” But then, before he could answer, something happened that surprised me so much I forgot all about him. Inside my head a garter snake said in a small sunrise-pink voice, we love you, Dusssie.
yesss, we do, said a blue racer.
And other snake voices spoke. Jussst be yourssself, said the smooth green snake who told stories.
We love you jussst the way you are, said the indigo snake.
We’ll ssstick with you, said a milk snake.
Yeah, they were stuck with me, all right. As they spoke I caught a whiff of their green-smelling thoughts of how it might feel to be free snakes, wild snakes, complete snakes, snakes with tails to shake, snakes with grass and leaves under their bellies, snakes with real meals—rodents, eggs, soft-shelled baby crayfish—sliding down their long gullets, snakes with pits to hibernate in, snakes with other snakes to mate with. They thought all this, yet they felt my hollow heart and they said to me, We love you, Dusssie.
Sounding kind of like a jewel of wisdom, rigid but shining, the queenly scarlet king snake spoke for the whole head. Dusssie, we all love you.
I sat stunned. I couldn’t think what to do about them. Couldn’t say a word.
NINE
The next morning Cy met me at his apartment door, smiling. “Dusie, I do believe I may have it licked.”
“Have it licked?”
“Licked!” Cy repeated, his smile widening clear across his face. “I may have figured out how to get rid of your snakes.”
Then my heart started pounding.
And all twenty-seven snakes coiled tense and quiet under my lavender posy-print sunbonnet.
“Here, I’ll show you.” Cy waved me into his apartment with his right arm, the one that wasn’t in a sling.
I followed him inside, taking off my hat, and sat at the table, trying not to let myself think too much that if this worked, I could go back to having friends and being normal, maybe even someday finding a boyfriend …
Cy sat down across from me, gesturing with his good hand, all excited. “I’ve been working on this day and night,” he said. “I didn’t say anything to you before because I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
“Working on what?”
“Okay.” He leaned toward me in a teaching sort of way. “Let’s start from the beginning. This riddle the Sphinx addressed to you, you win some, you lose some, whatever it was—”
“To lose I have to win, and to win I have to loosen.”
Cy nodded. “I must say that it makes no sense to me at all. Sounds like personal poetry. I decided to disregard it.”
I had a feeling he shouldn’t do that, but I couldn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what the Sphinx was talking about, either.
Cy went on. “And after all my reading in mythology, the only thing that seemed certain was that the snakes cannot be cut off your head without exceedingly negative results.”
“Right.”
“My instinct is that the same would apply if one attempted to remove said snakes via surgery, cauterization, laser, acid, et cetera. I do not think we can risk any such methods. Do you follow so far, Dusie?”
“Sure.”
Sure, whispered a king snake, all brown and thorny. Mostly, my snakes seemed bummed, listening without comment.
Cy went on. “So I began to focus on snakes as such, in scientific terms. In herpetology class I have been learning about the life cycle of snakes, and I began to think—you know I hold a doctorate in chemistry. I worked in pharmaceuticals for over forty years.”
Geez, I didn’t know. I’d never thought to ask. I mean, I’d never talked to old people
much, and I’d kind of forgotten to think Cy might have had a life.
“So I’ve been up nights studying herpetological biochemistry,” Cy said, “and here’s my thinking: Your snakes are drawing their sustenance from your bloodstream, just like a fetus in the womb. But if I could come up with some sort of inhibitor that would affect their metabolism but not yours, it would cut the umbilical cord, so to speak. If they were no longer being fed, they could not go on living indefinitely. They would simply starve and die.”
I felt my snakes grow even more intensely still, like the boa constrictors on TV when they’re about to strike and coil. But my snakes didn’t strike. Or speak. I felt only their silence.
“Once I got on the right track, it wasn’t hard at all,” Cy continued, all eager and happy like a terrier. “I just needed a few basic chemical compounds in the proper proportions, and an emulsifier, and voila, a herpetological metabolism inhibitor to be applied externally.”
I should have cheered or something, I guess, but I just sat there.
He must have seen how blank I looked. He tried to explain. “You know, their scales are just outgrowths of their skin. They have to be able to flex, so under and between their scales is soft skin a lot like yours. Porous. So I formulated the metabolism inhibitor as a kind of—you could call it snake lotion. Here it is. Look.” He held out a glass mayonnaise jar full of greenish goo. “You just dab some of this on them.”
Everything was happening so fast that I just stared at the jar in Cy’s hand.
“Rather,” Cy added, “on one of them. We ought to start with just one until we’re sure it works as expected and that it has no adverse side effects on you.”
I tried to think which snake I would want to kill. Not any of the king snakes. I couldn’t help admiring them because they were so bold, their markings, their personalities. But not the timid garter snakes either, or the shy, pretty ribbon snakes, or the little queen snakes. And not the corn snakes, so kind, always trying to encourage me. Or the smooth green snake, the storyteller. Or my beautiful, bossy indigo snake, or my fraidy-snake yellow-bellied racer, or my pure amber pine woods snake, or …
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