Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

by Gregory Maguire

  Had he not been warned, Boq wouldn’t have taken Nessarose as Elphaba’s sister. She was by no means green, or even blue-white like a genteel person with bad circulation. Nessarose stepped from the carriage elegantly, gingerly, strangely, sinking her heel to touch the iron step at the same time as her toe. Walking as oddly as she did, she drew attention to her feet, which kept eyes away from the torso, at least at first.

  The feet landed on the ground, driven there with a ferocious intention to balance, and Nessarose stood before him. She was as Elphaba had said: gorgeous, pink, slender as a wheat stalk, and armless. The academic shawl over her shoulders was cunningly folded to soften the shock.

  “Hello, good sir,” she said, nodding her head very slightly. “The valises are on top. Can you manage?” Her voice was as smooth and oiled as Elphaba’s was serrated. Nanny propelled Nessarose gently toward the hansom cab that Boq had engaged. He saw that Nessarose did not move well without being able to lean backward against a steadying hand.

  “So now Nanny has to see the girls through their schooling,” said Nanny to Boq as they rode along. “What with their sainted mother in her waterlogged grave these long years, and their father off his head. Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly. Madness is the most shining way. The elderly man, the Eminent Thropp, he’s still alive, and sensible as an old ploughshare. Survived his daughter and his granddaughter. Elphaba is the Thropp Third Descending. She’ll be the Eminence one day. As a Munchkinlander, you know about such things.”

  “Nanny don’t gossip, it hurts my soul,” Nessarose said.

  “Oh my pretty, don’t you fret. This Boq is an old friend, or as good as,” said Nanny. “Out in the swamps of Quadling hell, my friend, we’ve lost the art of conversation. We croak in chorus with what’s left of the froggie folk.”

  “I intend to have a headache from shame,” said Nessarose, charmingly.

  “But I knew Elphie when she was a small thing,” said Boq. “I’m from Rush Margins in Wend Hardings. I must’ve met you too.”

  “Primarily I preferred to reside at Colwen Grounds,” said Nanny. “I was a mortal comfort to the Lady Partra, the Thropp Second Descending. But occasionally I visited Rush Margins. So I may have met you when you were young enough to run around without trousers.”

  “How do you do,” said Nessarose.

  “The name is Boq,” said Boq.

  “This is Nessarose,” said Nanny, as if it were too painful for the girl to introduce herself. “She was to come up to Shiz next year, but we have learned there’s a problem with some Gillikinese minder going loopy. So Nanny is called to step in, and can Nanny leave her sweet? You see why not.”

  “A sad mystery, we hope for improvement,” said Boq.

  At Crage Hall, Boq witnessed the reunion of the sisters, which was warm and gratifying. Madame Morrible had her Grommetik thing wheel out tea and brisks for the Thropp females, and for Nanny, Boq, and Glinda. Boq, who had begun to worry about Glinda’s retreat into silence, was relieved to see Glinda cast a hard, appraising eye over the elegant dress of Nessarose. How could it be, he wondered if Glinda was wondering, that two sisters should each be disfigured, and should clothe themselves so unlike? Elphaba wore the humblest of dark frocks; today she was in a deep purple, almost a black. Nessarose, balanced on a sofa next to Nanny, who assisted by lifting teacups and crumpling buttery bits of crumpet, was in green silks, the colors of moss, emerald, and yellow-green roses. Green Elphaba, sitting on her other side and lending her support between the shoulders as she tilted her head back to sip her tea, looked like a fashion accessory.

  “The whole arrangement is highly unusual,” Madame Morrible was saying, “but we don’t have unlimited room to accommodate peculiarities, alas. We’ll leave Miss Elphaba and Miss Galinda—Glinda is it now, dear? How novel—we’ll leave those two old pals as they are, and we’ll set you up, Miss Nessarose, with your Nanny in the adjoining room that poor old Ama Clutch had. It’s small but you must think of it as cozy.”

  “But when Ama Clutch recovers?” asked Glinda.

  “Oh, but my dear,” said Madame Morrible, “such confidence the young have! Touching, really.” She continued in a more steely voice. “You have already told me of the long-standing recurrence of this unusual medical condition. I can only assume this has deteriorated into a permanent relapse.” She munched a biscuit in her slow, fishy way, her cheeks going in and out like the leather flaps of a bellows. “Of course we can all hope. Not much more than that, I’m afraid.”

  “And we can pray,” Nessarose said.

  “Oh well yes, that,” said the Head. “That goes without saying among people of good breeding, Miss Nessarose.”

  Boq watched Nessarose and Elphaba both blush. Glinda excused herself and went away. The usual pang of panic Boq felt at her departure was softened by knowing he would see her again in life sciences next week, for, with the new prohibitions on Animal hiring, the colleges had decided to give assembly lectures to all the students from all the colleges, at once. Boq would see Glinda at the first coeducation lecture ever held at Shiz. He couldn’t wait.

  Though she had changed. She had surely changed.

  2

  Glinda was changed. She knew it herself. She had come to Shiz a vain, silly thing, and she now found herself in a coven of vipers. Maybe it was her own fault. She had invented a nonsense disease for Ama Clutch, and Ama Clutch had come down with it. Was this proof of an inherent talent of sorcery? Glinda opted to specialize in sorcery this year, and accepted it as her punishment that Madame Morrible didn’t change her roomie as promised. Glinda no longer cared. Beside Doctor Dillamond’s death, a lot of other matters now seemed insignificant.

  But she didn’t trust Madame Morrible either. Glinda had told nobody else that stupid and extravagant lie. So now she would no longer allow Madame Morrible so much as a fingerhold into her life. And Glinda still didn’t have the nerve to confess her unintentional crime to anyone. While she fretted, Boq, that pesky little flea, kept zizzing around her looking for attention. She was sorry she had let him kiss her. What a mistake! Well, all that was behind her now, that trembling on the edges of social disaster. She had seen the Misses Pfannee et cetera for what they were—shallow, self-serving snobs—and she would have no more to do with them.

  So Elphaba, no longer a social liability, had all the potential of becoming an actual friend. If being saddled with this broken doll of a baby sister didn’t interfere too much. It was only with prodding that Glinda had gotten Elphaba to talk at all about her sister, so that Glinda might be prepared for Nessarose’s arrival and the enlargement of their social circle.

  “She was born at Colwen Grounds, when I was about three,” Elphaba had told her. “My family had gone back to Colwen Grounds for a short stay. It was one of those times of intense drought. Our father told us later, after our mother had died, that Nessarose’s birth had coincided with a temporary resurgence of well water in the vicinity. They’d been doing pagan dances and there was a human sacrifice.”

  Glinda had stared at Elphaba, who sounded at once unwilling and offhand.

  “A friend of theirs, a Quadling glassblower. The crowd, incited by some rabble-rousing pfaithers and a prophetic clock, fell on him and killed him. A man named Turtle Heart.” Elphaba had pressed the palms of her hands over the high uppers of her stiff black secondhand shoes, and kept her eyes trained on the floor. “I think that was why my parents became missionaries to the Quadling people, why they never went back to Colwen Grounds or Munchkinland.”

  “But your mother died in childbirth?” said Glinda. “How could she have been a missionary?”

  “She didn’t die for five years,” said Elphaba, looking at the folds of her dress, as if the story were an embarrassment. “She died when our younger brother was born. My father named him Shell, after Turtle Heart, I think. So Shell and Nessarose and I lived the lives of gypsy children, slopping around from Quadling settlement to settlement with Nanny a
nd our father, Frex. He preached, and Nanny taught us and raised us up and kept house such as we ever had, which wasn’t much. Meanwhile the Wizard’s men began draining the badlands to get at the ruby deposits. It never worked, of course. They managed to chase the Quadlings out and kill them, round them up in settlement camps for their own protection and starve them. They despoiled the badlands, raked up the rubies, and left. My father went barmy over it. There never were enough rubies to make it worth the effort; we still have no canal system to run that legendary water from the Vinkus all the way cross-country to Munchkinland. And the drought, after a few promising reprieves, continues unabated. The Animals are recalled to the lands of their ancestors, a ploy to give the farmers a sense of control over something anyway. It’s a systematic marginalizing of populations, Glinda, that’s what the Wizard’s all about.”

  “We were talking about your childhood,” said Glinda.

  “Well that’s it, that’s all part of it. You can’t divorce your particulars from politics,” Elphaba said. “You want to know what we ate? How we played?”

  “I want to know what Nessarose is like, and Shell,” said Glinda.

  “Nessarose is a strong-willed semi-invalid,” said Elphaba. “She’s very smart, and thinks she is holy. She has inherited my father’s taste for religion. She isn’t good at taking care of other people because she has never learned how to take care of herself. She can’t. My father required me to baby-sit her through most of my childhood. What she will do when Nanny dies I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to take care of her again.”

  “Oh, what a hideous prospect for a life,” said Glinda, before she could stop herself.

  But Elphaba only nodded grimly. “I can’t agree with you more,” she said.

  “As for Shell—” continued Glinda, wondering what fresh pain she might tread upon.

  “Male, and white, and whole,” she said. “He’s now about ten, I guess. He’ll stay at home and take care of our father. He is a boy, just as boys are. A little dull, maybe, but he hasn’t had the advantages we’ve had.”

  “Which are?” prompted Glinda.

  “Even for a short time,” said Elphaba, “we had a mother. Giddy, alcoholic, imaginative, uncertain, desperate, brave, stubborn, supportive woman. We had her. Melena. Shell had no mother but Nanny, who did her best.”

  “And who was your mother’s favorite?” said Glinda.

  “Can’t tell that,” said Elphaba casually, “don’t know. Would have been Shell, probably, since he’s a boy. But she died without seeing him so she didn’t even get that small consolation.”

  “Your father’s favorite?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said Elphaba, jumping up and finding her books on her shelf, and getting ready to run out and stop the conversation in its tracks. “That’s Nessarose. You’ll see why when you meet her. She’d be anyone’s favorite.” She skidded out of the room with no more than a brief flurry of green fingers, a good-bye.

  Glinda wasn’t so sure she favored Elphaba’s sister. Nessarose seemed so demanding. Nanny was overly attentive, and Elphaba kept suggesting adjustments in their living arrangements to make things perfect. Hitch the drapes to this angle instead of that, to keep the touch of the sun off Nessarose’s pretty skin. Can we have the oil lamp turned up high so Nessarose can read? Shhh, no chatting after hours; Nessarose has retired and she is such a light sleeper.

  Glinda was a bit awed by Nessarose’s freaky beauty. Nessarose dressed well (if not extravagantly). She deflected attention from herself, though, by a system of little social tics—the head lowered in a sudden onslaught of devotion, the eyes batting. It was especially moving—and irritating—to have to wipe away a trickle of tears brought on by some epiphany in Nessarose’s rich inner spiritual life of which bystanders could have no inkling. What did one say?

  Glinda began to retreat into her studies. Sorcery was being taught by a louche new instructor named Miss Greyling. She had a gushing respect for the subject but, it soon became apparent, little natural ability. “At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change,” she would flute at them. But when the chicken she tried to turn into a piece of toast became instead a mess of used coffee grounds cupped in a lettuce leaf, the students all made a mental note never to accept an invitation to dine with her.

  In the back of the room, creeping with pretend invisibility so that she might observe, Madame Morrible shook her head and clucked. Once or twice she could not stop herself from interfering. “No dab hand in the sorcerer’s parlor I,” she would protest, “yet surely Miss Greyling you’ve omitted the steps to bind and convince? I’m merely asking. Let me try. You know I take a special pleasure in our training of sorceresses.” Inevitably Miss Greyling sat on what was left of a previous demonstration, or dropped her purse, collapsing into a heap of shame and mortification. The girls giggled, and didn’t feel that they were learning much.

  Or were they? The benefit of Miss Greyling’s clumsiness was that they were not afraid to try for themselves. And she didn’t stint at enthusiasm if a student managed to accomplish the day’s task. The first time Glinda was able to mask a spool of thread with a spell of invisibility, even for a few seconds, Miss Greyling clapped her hands and jumped up and down and broke a heel off her shoe. It was gratifying, and encouraging.

  “Not that I have any objection,” said Elphaba one day, when she and Glinda and Nessarose (and, inevitably, Nanny) sat under a pearlfruit tree by the Suicide Canal. “But I have to wonder. How does the university get away with teaching sorcery when its original charter was so strictly unionist?”

  “Well, there isn’t anything inherently either religious or nonreligious about sorcery,” said Glinda. “Is there? There isn’t anything inherently pleasure faithist about it either.”

  “Spells, changings, apparitions? It’s all entertainment,” said Elphaba. “It’s theatre.”

  “Well, it can look like theatre, and in the hands of Miss Greyling it often looks like bad theatre,” admitted Glinda. “But the gist of it isn’t concerned with application. It’s a practical skill, like—like reading and writing. It’s not that you can, it’s what you read or write. Or, if you’ll excuse the play on words, what you spell.”

  “Father disapproved mightily,” Nessarose said, in the dulcet tones of the unflappably faithful. “Father always said that magic was the sleight of hand of the devil. He said pleasure faith was no more than an exercise to distract the masses from the true object of their devotion.”

  “That’s a unionist talking,” said Glinda, not taking offense. “A sensible opinion, if what you’re up against is charlatans or street performers. But sorcery doesn’t have to be that. What about the common witches up in the Glikkus? They say that they magick the cows they’ve imported from Munchkinland so they don’t go mooing over the edge of some precipice. Who could ever afford to put a fence on every ledge there? The magic is a local skill, a contribution to community well-being. It doesn’t have to supplant religion.”

  “It may not have to,” said Nessarose, “but if it tends to, then have we a duty to be wary of it?”

  “Oh, wary, well, I’m wary of the water I drink, it might be poisoned,” said Glinda. “That doesn’t mean I stop drinking water.”

  “Well, I don’t even think it’s so big an issue,” said Elphaba. “I think sorcery is trivial. It’s concerned with itself mostly, it doesn’t lead outward.”

  Glinda concentrated very hard and tried to make Elphaba’s leftover sandwich elevate outward over the canal. She only succeeded in exploding the thing in a small combustion of mayonnaise and shredded carrot and chopped olives. Nessarose lost her balance laughing, and Nanny had to prop her up again. Elphaba was covered in bits of food, which she picked off herself and ate, to the disgust and laughter of everyone else. “It’s all effects, Glinda,” she said. “There’s nothing ontologically interesting about magic. Not that I believe in unionism either,” she protested. “I’m an atheist and an aspiritualist.”

 
“You say that to shock and scandalize,” said Nessarose primly. “Glinda, don’t listen to a word of her. She always does this, usually to make Father irate.”

  “Father’s not around,” Elphaba reminded her sister.

  “I stand in for him and I am offended,” said Nessarose. “It’s all very well to turn your nose up at unionism when you have been given a nose by the Unnamed God. It’s quite funny, isn’t it, Glinda? Childish.” She looked spitting angry.

  “Father’s not around,” said Elphaba again, in a tone that verged on the apologetic. “You needn’t rush to public defense of his obsessions.”

  “What you term his obsessions are my articles of faith,” she said with a chilly clarity.

  “Well you’re not a bad sorceress, for a beginner,” said Elphaba, turning to Glinda. “That was a pretty good mess you made of my lunch.”

  “Thank you,” Glinda said. “I didn’t mean to pelt you with it. But I am getting better, aren’t I? And out in public.”

  “A shocking display,” Nessarose said. “That’s exactly what Father would have deplored about sorcery. The allure is all in the surface.”

  “I agree, it still tastes like olives,” Elphaba said, finding a clump of black olive in her sleeve and holding it out on the tip of her finger to her sister’s mouth. “Taste, Nessa?”

  But Nessarose turned her face away and lost herself in silent prayer.

  3

  A few days later Boq managed to catch Elphaba’s eye at the break of their life sciences class, and they met up in an alcove off the main corridor. “What do you think of this new Doctor Nikidik?” he asked.

  “I find it hard to listen,” she said, “but that’s because I still want to hear Doctor Dillamond and I can’t believe he’s gone.” On her face was a look of gray submission to impossible reality.

  “Well that’s one of the things I’m curious about,” he said. “You told me all about Doctor Dillamond’s breakthrough. Do you know if his lab has been cleared out yet? Maybe there’s something there worth finding. You took the notes for him, couldn’t they be the basis of some proposal, or at least some further study?”