Nor, for Janie’s mother, was there safety in numbers. Against the strictest orders, Janie strode into the midst of the fourth round of Gibsons one evening and stood at one end of the living room, flicking an insultingly sober gray-green gaze across the flushed faces. A round yellow-haired man who had his hand on her mother’s neck extended his glass and bellowed, “You’re Wima’s little girl!”
Every head in the room swung at once like a bank of servoswitches, turning off the noise, and into the silence Janie said, “You’re the one with the—”
“ Janie! ” her mother shouted. Someone laughed. Janie waited for it to finish. “—big, fat—” she enunciated. The man took his hand off Wima’s neck. Someone whooped, “Big fat what, Janie?”
Topically, for it was wartime, Janie said, “—meat market.”
Wima bared her teeth. “Run along back to your room, darling. I’ll come and tuck you in in a minute.” Someone looked straight at the blond man and laughed. Someone said in an echoing whisper, “There goes the Sunday sirloin.” A drawstring could not have pulled the fat man’s mouth so round and tight and from it his lower lip bloomed like strawberry jam from a squeezed sandwich.
Janie walked quietly toward the door and stopped as soon as she was out of her mother’s line of sight. A sallow young man with brilliant black eyes leaned forward suddenly. Janie met his gaze. An expression of bewilderment crossed the young man’s face. His hand faltered out and upward and came to rest on his forehead. It slid down and covered the black eyes.
Janie said, just loud enough for him to hear, “Don’t you ever do that again.” She left the room.
“Wima,” said the young man hoarsely, “that child is telepathic.”
“Nonsense,” said Wima absently, concentrating on the fat man’s pout. “She gets her vitamins every single day.”
The young man started to rise, looking after the child, then sank back again. “God,” he said, and began to brood.
When Janie was five she began playing with some other little girls. It was quite a while before they were aware of it. They were toddlers, perhaps two and a half years old, and they looked like twins. They conversed, if conversation it was, in high-pitched squeaks, and tumbled about on the concrete courtyard as if it were a haymow. At first Janie hung over her windowsill, four and a half stories above, and contemplatively squirted saliva in and out between her tongue and her hard palate until she had a satisfactory charge. Then she would crane her neck and, cheeks bulging, let it go. The twins ignored the bombardment when it merely smacked the concrete, but yielded up a most satisfying foofaraw of chitterings and squeals when she scored a hit. They never looked up but would race around in wild excitement, squealing.
Then there was another game. On warm days the twins could skin out of their rompers faster than the eye could follow. One moment they were as decent as a deacon and in the next one or both would be fifteen feet away from the little scrap of cloth. They would squeak and scramble and claw back into them, casting deliciously frightened glances at the basement door. Janie discovered that with a little concentration she could move the rompers—that is, when they were unoccupied. She practiced diligently, lying across the windowsill, her chest and chin on a cushion, her eyes puckered with effort. At first the garment would simply lie there and flutter weakly, as if a small dust-devil had crossed it. But soon she had the rompers scuttling across the concrete like little flat crabs. It was a marvel to watch those two little girls move when that happened, and the noise was a pleasure. They became a little more cautious about taking them off and sometimes Janie would lie in wait for forty minutes before she had a chance. And sometimes, even then, she held off and the twins, one clothed, one bare, would circle around the romper, and stalk it like two kittens after a beetle. Then she would strike, the romper would fly, the twins would pounce; and sometimes they caught it immediately, and sometimes they had to chase it until their little lungs were going like a toy steam engine.
Janie learned the reason for their preoccupation with the basement door when one afternoon she had mastered the knack of lifting the rompers instead of just pushing them around. She held off until the twins were lulled into carelessness and were shucking out of their clothes, wandering away, ambling back again, as if to challenge her. And still she waited, until at last both rompers were lying together in a little pink-and-white mound. Then she struck. The rompers rose from the ground in a steep climbing turn and fluttered to the sill of a first-floor window. Since the courtyard was slightly below street level, this put the garments six feet high and well out of reach. There she left them.
One of the twins ran to the center of the courtyard and jumped up and down in agitation, stretching and craning to see the rompers. The other ran to the building under the firstfloor window and reached her little hands up as high as she could get them, patting at the bricks fully twenty-eight inches under her goal. Then they ran to each other and twittered anxiously. After a time they tried reaching up the wall again, side by side. More and more they threw those terrified glances at the basement door; less and less was there any pleasure mixed with the terror.
At last they hunkered down as far as possible away from the door, put their arms about one another and stared numbly. They slowly quieted down, from chatters to twitters to cooings, and at last were silent, two tiny tuffets of terror.
It seemed hours—weeks—of fascinated anticipation before Janie heard a thump and saw the door move. Out came the janitor, as usual a little bottle-weary. She could see the red crescents under his sagging yellow-whited eyes. “Bonnie!” he bellowed, “Beanie! Wha y’all?” He lurched out into the open and peered around. “Come out yeah! Look at yew! I gwine snatch yew bald-headed! Wheah’s yo’ clo’es?” He swooped down on them and caught them, each huge hand on a tiny biceps. He held them high, so that each had one toe barely touching the concrete and their little captured elbows pointed skyward. He turned around, once, twice, seeking, and at last his eye caught the glimmer of the rompers on the sill. “How you do dat?” he demanded. “You trine th’ow away yo’ ’spensive clo’es? Oh, I gwine whop you.”
He dropped to one knee and hung the two little bodies across the other thigh. It is probable that he had the knack of cupping his hand so that he produced more sound than fury, but however he did it, the noise was impressive. Janie giggled.
The janitor administered four equal swats to each twin and set them on their feet. They stood silently side by side with their hands pressed to their bottoms and watched him stride to the windowsill and snatch the rompers off. He threw them down at their feet and waggled his right forefinger at them. “Cotch you do dat once mo’, I’ll git Mr. Milton the conductah come punch yo’ ears fulla holes. Heah? ” he roared. They shrank together, their eyes round. He lurched back to the door and slammed it shut behind him.
The twins slowly climbed into their rompers. Then they went back to the shadows by the wall and hunkered down, supporting themselves with their backs and their feet. They whispered to one another. There was no more fun for Janie that day.
Across the street from Janie’s apartment house was a park. It had a bandstand, a brook, a moulting peacock in a wire enclosure and a thick little copse of dwarf oak. In the copse was a hidden patch of bare earth, known only to Janie and several thousand people who were wont to use it in pairs at night. Since Janie was never there at night she felt herself its discoverer and its proprietor.
Some four days after the spanking episode, she thought of the place. She was bored with the twins; they never did anything interesting any more. Her mother had gone to lunch somewhere after locking her in her room. (One of her admirers, when she did this, had once asked, “What about the kid? Suppose there’s a fire or something?” “Fat chance!” Wima had said with regret.)
The door of her room was fastened with a hook-and-eye on the outside. She walked to the door and looked up at the corresponding spot inside. She heard the hook rise and fall. She opened the door and walked down the hall and out to the
elevators. When the self-service car arrived, she got in and pressed the third-, second- and first-floor buttons. One floor at a time the elevator descended, stopped, opened its gate, closed its gate, descended, stopped, opened its gate . . . it amused her, it was so stupid. At the bottom she pushed all of the buttons and slid out. Up the stupid elevator started. Janie clucked pityingly and went outdoors.
She crossed the street carefully, looking both ways. But when she got to the copse she was a little less ladylike. She climbed into the lower branches of the oak and across the multiple crotches to a branch she knew which overhung the hidden sanctuary. She thought she saw a movement in the bushes, but she was not sure. She hung from the branch, went hand over hand until it started to bend, waited until she had stopped swinging, and then let go.
It was an eight-inch drop to the earthen floor—usually. This time . .
The very instant her fingers left the branch, her feet were caught and snatched violently backward. She struck the ground flat on her stomach. Her hands happened to be together, at her midriff; the impact turned them inward and drove her own fist into her solar plexus. For an unbearably long time she was nothing but one tangled knot of pain. She fought and fought and at long last sucked a tearing breath into her lungs. It would come out through her nostrils but she could get no more in. She fought again in a series of sucking sobs and blowing hisses, until the pain started to leave her.
She managed to get up on her elbows. She spat out dirt, part dusty, part muddy. She got her eyes open just enough to see one of the twins squatting before her, inches away. “Ho-ho,” said the twin, grabbed her wrists, and pulled hard. Down she went on her face again. Reflexively she drew up her knees. She received a stinging blow on the rump. She looked down past her shoulder as she flung herself sideways and saw the other twin just in the midst of the follow-through with the stave from a nail keg which she held in her little hands. “He-hee,” said the twin.
Janie did what she had done to the sallow, black-eyed man at the cocktail party. “Eeep,” said the twin and disappeared, flickered out the way a squeezed appleseed disappears from between the fingers. The little cask stave clattered to the packed earth. Janie caught it up, whirled, and brought it down on the head of the twin who had pulled her arms. But the stave whooshed down to strike the ground; there was no one there.
Janie whimpered and got slowly to her feet. She was alone in the shadowed sanctuary. She turned and turned back. Nothing. No one.
Something plurped just on the center part of her hair. She clapped her hand to it. Wet. She looked up and the other twin spit too. It hit her on the forehead. “Ho-ho,” said one. “Hehee,” said the other.
Janie’s upper lip curled away from her teeth, exactly the way her mother’s did. She still held the cask stave. She slung it upward with all her might. One twin did not even attempt to move. The other disappeared.
“Ho-ho.” There she was, on another branch. Both were grinning widely.
She hurled a bolt of hatred at them the like of which she had never even imagined before.
“Ooop,” said one. The other said “Eeep.” Then they were both gone.
Clenching her teeth, she leapt for the branch and swarmed up into the tree.
“Ho-ho.”
It was very distant. She looked up and around and down and back; and something made her look across the street.
Two little figures sat like gargoyles on top of the courtyard wall. They waved to her and were gone.
For a long time Janie clung to the tree and stared at the wall. Then she let herself slide down into the crotch, where she could put her back against the trunk and straddle a limb. She unbuttoned her pocket and got her handkerchief. She licked a fold of it good and wet and began wiping the dirt off her face with little feline dabs.
They’re only three years old, she told herself from the astonished altitude of her seniority. Then, They knew who it was all along, that moved those rompers.
She said aloud, in admiration, “Ho-ho . . .” There was no anger left in her. Four days ago the twins couldn’t even reach a six-foot sill. They couldn’t even get away from a spanking. And now look.
She got down on the street side of the tree and stepped daintily across the street. In the vestibule, she stretched up and pressed the shiny brass button marked janitor. While waiting she stepped off the pattern of tiles in the floor, heel and toe.
“Who push dat? You push dat?” His voice filled the whole world.
She went and stood in front of him and pushed up her lips the way her mother did when she made her voice all croony, like sometimes on the telephone. “Mister Widdecombe, my mother says can I play with your little girls.”
“She say dat? Well! ” The janitor took off his round hat and whacked it against his palm and put it on again. “Well. Dat’s mighty nice . . . little gal,” he said sternly, “is yo’ mother to home?”
“Oh yes,” said Janie, fairly radiating candor.
“You wait raht cheer,” he said, and pounded away down the cellar steps.
She had to wait more than ten minutes this time. When he came back with the twins he was fairly out of breath. They looked very solemn.
“Now don’t you let ’em get in any mischief. And see ef you cain’t keep them clo’es on ’em. They ain’t got no more use for clo’es than a jungle monkey. Gwan, now, hole hands, chillun, an’ mine you don’t leave go tel you git there.”
The twins approached guardedly. She took their hands. They watched her face. She began to move toward the elevators, and they followed. The janitor beamed after them.
Janie’s whole life shaped itself from that afternoon. It was a time of belonging, of thinking alike, of transcendent sharing. For her age, Janie had what was probably a unique vocabulary, yet she spoke hardly a word. The twins had not yet learned to talk. Their private vocabulary of squeaks and whispers was incidental to another kind of communion. Janie got a sign of it, a touch of it, a sudden opening, growing rush of it. Her mother hated her and feared her; her father was a remote and angry entity, always away or shouting at mother or closed sulkily about himself. She was talked to, never spoken to.
But here was converse, detailed, fluent, fascinating, with no sound but laughter. They would be silent; they would all squat suddenly and paw through Janie’s beautiful books; then suddenly it was the dolls. Janie showed them how she could get chocolates from the box in the other room without going in there and how she could throw a pillow clear up to the ceiling without touching it. They liked that, though the paintbox and easel impressed them more.
It was a thing together, binding, immortal; it would always be new for them and it would never be repeated.
The afternoon slid by, as smooth and soft and lovely as a passing gull, and as swift. When the hall door banged open and Wima’s voice clanged out, the twins were still there.
“All righty, all righty, come in for a drink then, who wants to stand out there all night.” She pawed her hat off and her hair swung raggedly over her face. The man caught her roughly and pulled her close and bit her face. She howled. “You’re crazy, you old crazy you.” Then she saw them, all three of them peering out. “Dear old Jesus be to God,” she said, “she’s got the place filled with niggers.”
“They’re going home,” said Janie resolutely. “I’ll take ’em home right now.”
“Honest to God, Pete,” she said to the man, “this is the God’s honest first time this ever happened. You got to believe that, Pete. What kind of a place you must think I run here, I hate to think how it looks to you. Well get them the hell out!” she screamed at Janie. “Honest to God, Pete, so help me, never before—”
Janie walked down the hall to the elevators. She looked at Bonnie and at Beanie. Their eyes were round. Janie’s mouth was as dry as a carpet and she was so embarrassed her legs cramped. She put the twins into an elevator and pressed the bottom button. She did not say goodbye, though she felt nothing else.
She walked slowly back to the apartment and went i
n and closed the door. Her mother got up from the man’s lap and clattered across the room. Her teeth shone and her chin was wet. She raised claws—not a hand, not a fist, but red, pointed claws.
Something happened inside Janie like the grinding of teeth, but deeper inside her than that. She was walking and she did not stop. She put her hands behind her and tilted her chin up so she could meet her mother’s eyes.
Wima’s voice ceased, snatched away. She loomed over the five-year-old, her claws out and forward, hanging, curving over, a blood-tipped wave about to break.
Janie walked past her and into her room, and quietly closed the door.
Wima’s arms drew back, strangely, as if they must follow the exact trajectory of their going. She repossessed them and the dissolving balance of her body and finally her voice. Behind her the man’s teeth clattered swiftly against a glass.
Wima turned and crossed the room to him, using the furniture like a series of canes and crutches. “Oh God,” she murmured, “but she gives me the creeps. . . .”
He said, “You got lots going on around here.”
Janie lay in bed as stiff and smooth and contained as a round toothpick. Nothing would get in, nothing could get out; somewhere she had found this surface that went all the way through, and as long as she had it, nothing was going to happen.
But if anything happens, came a whisper, you’ll break. But if I don’t break, nothing will happen, she answered.
But if anything . .
The dark hours came and grew black and the black hours labored by.
Her door crashed open and the light blazed. “He’s gone and baby, I’ve got business with you. Get out here!” Wima’s bathrobe swirled against the doorpost as she turned and went away.
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 22