“I’ll look after her. I’ll help her through the pitfalls of life. I’ll make sure she grows up right.”
“I can do that myself, thank you,” said Mr. Meisner.
“Ah, but you can’t watch over her all the time, can you?” Arnold said triumphantly. “In fact, just today I caught her rolling in the mud, deliberately getting her dress dirty, and I sent her straight home. Can you know what other trouble she’ll get into when your back is turned? Can you guard her from every bad influence shell run into outside the home, point out every mistake to her as she makes it, help her to resist every temptation she’ll ever run into, anywhere? I can do all that.”
“But . . .” said Mr. Meisner, rather dazedly, “why are you willing to wait ten years for my daughter?”
“So that I can make absolutely sure that she’s the kind of woman I want to marry.” Arnold sighed. “I’ve been disappointed twice before, Mr. Meisner, with fiancées who were girls from good families, supposedly well brought up . . . and yet, underneath it all, it turned out that they were really . . . sluts. They had been spoiled, in spite of their good backgrounds, in spite of all their parents could do. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Meisner, somewhere, at some time, the germ of corruption had worked its way in.” He paused broodingly, and then, his voice quickening with enthusiasm, said, “But this way, using the timescope, I can actually help to mold Marcy into the type of girl she should be, I can personally supervise every detail—”
The study door opened, and Marcy was standing there, looking flushed and rather flustered, her dress splattered with mud. “Daddy—” she began breathlessly.
“There! See!” Arnold said smugly. “There she is, and she’s perfectly all right. And look, there’s the mud, just like I told you . . .”
Marcy gasped and flinched, and fell back a step, her eyes widening. Her face filled with fright, and, after a moment, with guilt.
Her father was staring at her oddly. “Go upstairs now, Marcy,” he said at last. “We’ll talk about what you did to your dress later on.”
“But Daddy . . .”
“Go upstairs now,” Mr. Meisner said curtly, “I’m very busy.”
As the door was swinging shut, he turned his face back up to the ceiling and said, “Now, then, Mr. Waxman—”
Marcy stood outside the door of her father’s study for a long time, listening to the voices rising and falling within, and then, troubled, she went slowly upstairs to her room.
###
That night, as she was getting ready to turn out her light and go to sleep, the voice spoke to her again. She shrieked and jumped into bed and pulled the covers up over her head. She lay there quivering, somehow shocked that the voice could follow her even into her very own room. The voice droned on for what seemed like an eternity while she hugged the covers tighter and tried not to listen, telling her stupid stories about how wonderful their lives together would be, the wonderful things they would do, how they would live in a castle . . .
Later, after her room had become quiet again, she cautiously poked one eye and her nose out from under the blanket, looked warily around, and then snaked her hand over to turn out the light, hoping that he wouldn’t be able to find her in the dark.
They were lies, she told herself as she stared up at the shadowy ceiling of her room, all the things he’d said, all lies. None of that was going to happen. Marcy already had her life planned anyway: she was going to live in the Congo and be like Wonder Woman who never had to marry anybody, even though everybody was in love with her because she saved people’s lives all the time and was beautiful. There would be no room in such a plan for Arnold.
###
The next day, at dinner, Marcy’s mother said, “But Marcy, this is for your own good.” She and Mr. Meisner and Marcy were seated at the kitchen table. “Arnold sounds like a very nice man, and Mommie and Daddy and Arnold are going to make sure that you have a wonderful life and have everything you want.”
“I don’t want everything I want,” Marcy whined. “Not if I have to listen to that dumb old Arnold all the time. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”
“Now that certainly isn’t the way a young lady speaks to her parents.” Arnold’s voice seemed to be coming from the radar range under the Colonial-style kitchen cabinets. “Little Marcia, do you—”
“Don’t call me ‘Little Marcia.’ My name is Marcy, and I’m not little.”
“Very well,” said Arnold. “Marcy, do you remember the Ten Commandments?”
Marcy looked down at her bowl of strawberry ice cream, and then carefully mashed the artificially colored mounds flat with the back of her teaspoon.
“Well, do you remember the Ten Commandments?” Mrs. Meisner asked. Mrs. Meisner had once been beautiful, but she had allowed herself to gain weight, which clouded the once-strong features of her face. But she still had beautiful pale skin and eyes as pale blue as Marcy’s. She wore her thick, dyed red hair shoulder-length, but it was sprayed so heavily that it shone as if it were shellacked. “Marcy, stop playing with your ice cream and answer Arnold. And be polite!”
“I know you’re not supposed to steal or kill anybody or eat lobster,” Marcy said sullenly.
“But you are supposed to respect your parents . . . and your elders.” Now Arnold’s stern voice seemed to be coming from somewhere above the table. “ ‘Honor thy father and mother,’ ” the voice intoned ominously.
“Not if they try to make me marry a stupid old voice!” Marcy said, and she ran out of the kitchen, through the red-carpeted hallway, and up the stairs to her bedroom.
“I think you owe your parents an apology,” the voice said to Marcy, who was lying on her bed, her arms extended as if she were flying or perhaps floating.
Marcy stuck her tongue out at the ceiling, which was where she thought Arnold might be.
“I think a spanking would be in order unless you apologize to your parents this very moment,” Arnold said.
“Who’s going to spank me?” Marcy asked petulantly. “You?”
“I think your father is very capable of taking care of that.”
“Well, he’s never spanked me ever, so shut up and go away.” Five minutes later, Marcy received her first spanking from her father.
###
The first few weeks under the new regime weren’t too bad, although Arnold was an awful pest, and nagged her a lot, particularly when her parents weren’t around. By now, everybody was talking about the Voices from the future—more than thirty different cases had been reported from all over the globe, the contacts initiated for a bewildering variety of reasons, most of them amazingly frivolous—but Arnold at first was reasonably discreet about lecturing her in front of other people, and only Marcy’s parents knew about him.
All that ended, along with the last shreds of her old life, one night, perhaps a month later, when Marcy was having dinner at Shelley Mitnich’s house.
“Are you sure your parents won’t mind if you eat this?” Mrs. Mitnich asked Marcy as she served a platter filled with lobster tails. She also placed a little bowl of melted butter between Marcy and Shelley.
“No, they don’t mind,” Marcy said. “We can’t eat it at home, but I’m allowed to have it in restaurants or at my friends’, like here.” Lobster was Marcy’s favorite food.
Mr. Mitnich mumbled something Marcy couldn’t hear, and Mrs. Mitnich gave him a nasty look.
“Well, I know your parents aren’t Orthodox,” Mrs. Mitnich said, but before Marcy could put a piece of the pink meat into her mouth, a voice said, “Put that fork down this very instant!”
“Shut up, Arnold!” Marcy shouted. Her face turned red, and she looked around the dining room, as if Arnold would suddenly appear in the flesh to mortify her.
“You know better than to eat traif,” Arnold said. With shocked expressions on their faces, Shelley and her parents looked around the room and then at Marcy.
“I can eat whatever I want,” Marcy whined. “My parents let me eat whatever I want when
I’m out . . . and it’s none of your business, you goddamn geek!”
“Little girls with breeding do not use such language,” Arnold said.
“Who the hell are you?” Mr. Mitnich asked as he stood up and waved his hands over the table where the voice seemed to be coming from, as if he could brush it away like a spiderweb. “I’ve heard all about weirdos like you.” Then he leaned over toward Marcy and asked, “Honey, when did this weirdo from the future start bothering you?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the voice, which seemed to be coming from the far side of the room now.
“Shut up, you,” Mr. Mitnich said to the wall, and then he turned toward Marcy again. “Do your parents know about this pervert?”
“They most certainly do, sir,” Arnold said smugly. “I’ve arranged to marry Marcy when she’s of age. I’m simply trying to save her from your daughter’s fate. If that’s being a pervert, then so be it.”
“And just what is my daughter’s fate?” Mr. Mitnich asked, looking at the wall.
“I’d rather not say.”
Mr. Mitnich was livid. “Get out of here, you! Oh . . . and Marcy . . . I don’t think you should be playing with Shelley anymore. Your parents should be ashamed of themselves. Bringing such filth into their own home . . . and ours.”
“You just wait and see what happens to your daughter,” Arnold said nastily. “Boy! You should only be so lucky to have someone like me to look after her!”
Mr. Mitnich threw his coffee cup at the ceiling.
Then Marcy was outside, trudging along toward her house as the bitter tears runneled her cheeks, and Arnold was telling her that she didn’t need friends like that anyway, because after all, she had him.
###
After that, the word got out and Marcy became a minor celebrity for a while, even appearing on a television news program. This was small comfort to Marcy, though—Arnold became more and more strict as time went by, reprimanding her constantly in front of the other kids, snapping at children and adults who he thought were “bad influences,” until eventually no one would play with her at all. She had lost all her friends, and even her teachers tended to leave her alone, tucking her away in back of the class where they could safely ignore her.
Arnold was with her nearly all the time now, and Marcy soon learned that it was nearly impossible to hide from him. When she hid under the azalea bush in the backyard and “touched herself,” Arnold was suddenly there too, thundering wrath from out of the cloudy sky, loudly telling her parents about the disgusting thing their daughter had been doing, and Marcy had to promise never to do it again, and cried herself to sleep from the shame of it every night for a week. When Marcy stole a chocolate-covered cherry from her mother’s candy box, Arnold was there. When Marcy wiped her nose on the sleeve of her new jacket, Arnold was there. When Marcy tried to hide her report card, Arnold was there. When Marcy let Diane Berkowitz talk her into trying a cigarette, Arnold was there.
He came to her every day and lectured her about morality and sin and perversion. He loved to talk about etiquette and deportment, and he made her read thick musty books to “expand her horizons.”
He told her in secret that her parents weren’t very smart or, for that matter, very well educated.
He told her that he was her only friend.
He told her that she was very lucky to have him, for he was her salvation.
###
Soon after Marcy’s fifteenth birthday, someone finally invented the timescope, belatedly justifying the prophecy of its existence. The inventor had been prompted by hints and “pointers” from the future, but with the exception of a few nitpicking scientists, no one seemed particularly disturbed by the hair-raising tangle of paradoxes this implied. Within a year, timescopes were for sale on the commercial market, although they were indeed very expensive to own and operate.
Soon after Marcy’s sixteenth birthday, Shelley Mitnich got pregnant, and by a shvartzer yet: Arnold crowed about that for months, and his stock with Mr. Meisner became unassailably high.
Soon after Marcy’s seventeenth birthday, she tried talking to her mother about Arnold. Marcy still didn’t see any way out of marrying Arnold if her parents said that she had to—although if she’d been a few years older, or less dominated by her parents and Arnold, or if her counselor at school had been sympathetic enough to really open up to, or if she’d had any real friends with whom to talk things over, she might have seen several other options—and the prospect terrified her. Mrs. Meisner put down the Soap Opera Digest and listened patiently to her daughter, but her tired fat face was unsympathetic. “You don’t love him,” Mrs. Meisner said. She made a rotating motion with her hand and said, “So? You can’t learn to love a rich man just as easily as a poor one?”
###
Marcy’s eighteenth birthday was approaching. She lay unsleeping in the close darkness of her room, night after night, listening to the buzzing and clicking of the street lamp outside her window, watching the glow of car headlights sweep across the ceiling in oscillating waves, like phosphorescent surf breaking on a black midnight beach.
In the mornings, the face that looked back at her from her mirror was haggard and pale. She began to grow gaunt, the flesh pulling back tightly over her cheekbones, her eyes becoming hollowed and darkly bruised. She had almost stopped eating. During the day she would pace constantly, like a caged animal, unable to stand still, awash with a sick, directionless energy that left her headachy and nauseous. At night she would lie rigid and unmoving in her bed, still as a statue, the blankets pulled up to her neck, taut with dread and anticipation of the voice that might speak to her from the darkness at any moment, without warning, the voice and the watching presence she could never escape . . .
On the third such night, lying tensely in darkness and watching leaf-shadows shake and reticulate across the walls, she made her decision.
Slowly, cautiously, she pushed the blankets aside and got out of bed. She groped across the room to the dresser, not daring to turn on the light, finding her things by touch. Since puberty, since her body hair had begun to grow and her breasts had started to bloom, she had kept her room totally dark at night, unable to bear the thought of him staring at her while she undressed; she had taken to dressing under the sheet in the morning, hurrying through baths and showers as quickly as she could, certain that he was staring at her nakedness whenever he got the chance, convinced that she could feel his eyes crawling over her whenever she was obliged to take off the swaddling, smothering, all-concealing clothes she had come to prefer. Tucked away under the shapeless, tentlike dresses, though, she still kept a pair of jeans and a dark blue cardigan sweater, perhaps unconsciously saved for an emergency like this. She fumbled her way into the clothes, hesitating after every movement, trying to inch her dresser drawer open soundlessly and freezing for a long terrified moment when it emitted a loud raucous squeak, glancing compulsively upward at the milky ceiling (where he lived, or so the child in the back of her mind still believed), more than half-expecting to hear his voice any second, asking her in that snide and chilly tone just what in the world she thought she was doing. But by the time she had tied the last lace on her sneakers, crouching in the deep shadow of the chiffonier, she had begun to feel a little more confident—she had been quiet and unrebellious for a long time now, she hadn’t tried to sneak out of her room at night for years, and even he couldn’t watch her all the time, every moment. He had to sleep sometime, after all.
Maybe it was going to work.
No longer moving with quite the same exaggerated stealth, Marcy slid her window open and climbed out onto the slanting second-story roof. Surely if he were watching, he would say something now . . . but then she was outside, feeling the slippery tile under her feet, seeing the fat pale moon overhead through a scrim of silhouetted branches, and still the alarm hadn’t come. She walked surefootedly along the roof to the big elm that grew at the corner of the house, leaped across to it, and shimmied down it to the groun
d in a shower of brittle leaves and displaced twigs, and only when she was standing on the ground, her feet planted firmly in the damp grass, only then did she sway and become dizzy . . .
The bus into the center of town stopped right across from her house, but she caught it a few blocks down, just to be safe. She held her breath until the bus doors sighed shut behind her, and then she slumped into a seat, and was taken by a fit of convulsive shivering. She had to wrap her hands around the edge of the seat in front of her and squeeze it until her knuckles whitened before the shivering stopped, and when it had, and she was calmer, she was content to just sit for a moment and watch the pastel lights of the city ticking by outside the window. But she mustn’t allow herself to be lulled. She mustn’t allow herself to think that she was safe, not yet. She had worked it all out a dozen times. There was no sense in just running away—sooner or later, Arnold would find out where she had gone, track her down no matter where she went, and then her parents would just come and get her, or send the cops to pick her up. And the next time they’d watch her more closely, make it far more difficult for her to get away. No, it was now or never; she must use this opportunity now, while she had the chance, and there was only one thing she could think of to do with the stolen time that might be effective enough to break her free of Arnold.
She had become uneasy again, thinking about it. How much time did she have? Maybe a few hours . . . at the most . . . Possibly as little as a half an hour, twenty minutes, maybe less. Sooner or later, the alarm would sound . . . She felt the tension building up inside her again, like a hand rhythmically squeezing her guts, and she began to look anxiously around her at the people getting on and off the bus. She had not worked out the logistical details, the practical details, of her plan—she had vaguely imagined going to a bar, or a nightclub (but what if they wouldn’t let her in?), or maybe to a bowling alley, or a restaurant, or . . . but she didn’t have time for all that! Any minute now, the alarm was going to come, she knew it. She was running out of time . . . And now the bus was emptying out, there were fewer and fewer people getting on . . . .
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