The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “You don’t know me,” said Elphaba, pausing as she turned. “However could you know me?”

  “You’re Miss Elphie, aren’t you?”

  “Miss Elphie!” cried Galinda gaily. “How delightful!”

  “How do you know who I am?” said Elphaba. “Master Boq from Munchkinland? I don’t know you.”

  “You and I played together when you were tiny,” said Boq. “My father was the mayor of the village you were born in. I think. You were born in Rush Margins, in Wend Hardings, weren’t you? You’re the daughter of the unionist minister, I forget his name.”

  “Frex,” said Elphaba. Her eyes looked slanted and wary.

  “Frexspar the Godly!” said Boq. “That’s right. You know they still talk about him, and your mama, and the night the Clock of the Time Dragon came to Rush Margins. I was two or three years old and they took me to see it, but I don’t remember that. I do remember that you were in a play set with me when I was still in short pants. Do you remember Gawnette? She was the woman who minded us. And Bfee? He is my dad. Do you remember Rush Margins?”

  “This is all smoke and guesswork,” said Elphaba. “How can I contradict? Let me tell you about what happened in your life before you can remember it. You were born a frog.” (This was unkind, as Boq did have an amphibious look about him.) “You got sacrificed to the Clock of the Time Dragon and were turned into a boy. But on your marriage night when your wife opens her legs you’ll turn back into a tadpole and—”

  “Miss Elphaba!” cried Galinda, flicking open her fan to wave the flush of shame from her face. “Your tongue!”

  “Oh well, I have no childhood,” said Elphaba. “So you can say what you like. I grew up in Quadling Country with the marsh people. I squelch when I walk. You don’t want to talk to me. Talk to Miss Galinda, she’s much better in parlors than I am. I have to go now.” Elphaba nodded a good night salute and escaped, almost at a run.

  “Why did she say all that?” said Boq, no embarrassment in his voice, just wonder. “Of course I remember her. How many green people are there?”

  “It’s just possible,” considered Galinda, “that she didn’t like being recognized on account of her skin color. I don’t know for sure, but perhaps she’s sensitive about it.”

  “She must know that it’s what people would remember.”

  “Well, as far as I am aware, you are right about who she is,” Galinda went on. “They tell me her great-grandfather is the Eminent Thropp of Colwen Grounds in Nest Hardings.”

  “That’s the one,” Boq said. “Elphie. I never thought I’d see her again.”

  “Won’t you have some more tea? I’ll call the server,” Galinda said. “Let us sit here and you can tell me all about Munchkinland. I am aquiver with curiosity.” She perched herself back on the chair-in-sympathetic-colors and looked her very best. Boq sat down, and shook his head, as if bewildered by the apparition of Elphaba.

  When Galinda retired that evening, Elphaba was already in bed, blankets pulled up over her head, and a patently theatrical snore issuing forth. Galinda huffed herself into bed with a wump, annoyed that she could feel rejected by the green girl.

  In the week that followed much was said about the evening of Quells. Doctor Dillamond interrupted his biology lecture to call for a response from his students. The girls didn’t understand what a biological response to poetry might be and sat silent at his leading questions. He finally exploded, “Doesn’t anyone make the connection between the expression of those thoughts and what’s been going on in the Emerald City?”

  Miss Pfannee, who didn’t believe she was paying tuition in order to be yelled at, snapped back at him. “We don’t have the tiniest notion what’s going on in the Emerald City! Stop playing games with us; if you have something to say, say it. Don’t bleat so.”

  Doctor Dillamond stared out the windows and seemed to be trying to control his temper. The students were thrilled with the little drama. Then the Goat turned and in a milder voice than they expected he told them that the Wizard of Oz had proclaimed Banns on Animal Mobility, effective several weeks ago. This meant not only that Animals were restricted in their access to travel conveyances, lodgings, and public services. The Mobility it referred to was also professional. Any Animal coming of age was prohibited from working in the professions or the public sector. They were, effectively, to be herded back to the farmlands and wilds if they wanted to work for wages at all.

  “What do you think Madame Morrible was saying when she ended that Quell with the epigram Animals should be seen and not heard?” asked the Goat tersely.

  “Well, anyone would be upset,” said Galinda. “I mean, any Animal. But it’s not as if your job is threatened, is it? Here you are, still teaching us.”

  “What about my children? What about my kids?”

  “Do you have kids? I didn’t know you were married.”

  The Goat closed his eyes. “I’m not married, Miss Galinda. But I might be. Or I may. Or perhaps I have nieces and nephews. They have already been banned effectively from studying at Shiz because they can’t hold a pencil to write an essay with. How many Animals have you ever seen in this paradise of education?” Well, it was true; there were none.

  “Well, I do think it’s pretty dreadful,” said Galinda. “Why would the Wizard of Oz do such a thing?”

  “Why indeed,” said the Goat.

  “No, really, why. It’s a real question. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either.” The Goat turned to his rostrum and shoved some papers this way and that, and was then seen pawing a handkerchief from a lower shelf, and blowing his nose. “My grandmothers were milking-Goats at a farm in Gillikin. Through their lifelong sacrifices and labors they purchased the help of a local schoolteacher to educate me and to take dictation when I went for my exams. Their efforts are about to go to waste.”

  “But you can still teach!” said Pfannee petulantly.

  “The thin edge of the wedge, my dear,” said the Goat, and dismissed the class early. Galinda found herself glancing over toward Elphaba, who had a strange, focused look. As Galinda fled the classroom, Elphaba approached the front of the room, where Doctor Dillamond stood shaking in uncontrolled spasms, his horned head bowed.

  A few days later, Madame Morrible gave one of her occasional open lectures on Early Hymns and Pagan Paeans. She called for questions, and the entire assembly was startled to see Elphaba unfold herself from her customary fetal position in the back of the room and address the Head.

  “Madame Morrible, if you please,” said Elphaba, “we never had an opportunity to discuss the Quells that you recited in the parlor last week.”

  “Discuss,” said Madame Morrible with a generous though shooing wave of the bangled hands.

  “Well, Doctor Dillamond seemed to think they were in questionable taste, given the Banns on Animal Mobility.”

  “Doctor Dillamond, alas,” said Madame Morrible, “is a doctor. He is not a poet. He is also a Goat, and I might ask you girls if we have ever had a great Goat sonneteer or balladeer? Alas, dear Miss Elphaba, Doctor Dillamond doesn’t understand the poetic convention of irony. Would you like to define irony for the class, please?”

  “I don’t believe I can, Madame.”

  “Irony, some say, is the art of juxtaposing incongruous parts. One needs a knowing distance. Irony presupposes detachment, which, alas, in the case of Animal Rights, we may forgive Doctor Dillamond for being without.”

  “So that phrase that he objected to—Animals should be seen and not heard—that was ironic?” continued Elphaba, studying her papers and not looking at Madame Morrible. Galinda and her classmates were enthralled, for it was clear that each of the females at opposite ends of the room would have enjoyed seeing the other crumple in a sudden attack of the spleen.

  “One could consider it in an ironic mode if one chose,” said Madame Morrible.

  “How do you choose?” said Elphaba.

  “How impertinent!” said Madame Morrible.

&
nbsp; “Well, but I don’t mean impertinence. I’m trying to learn. If you—if anyone—thought that statement was true, then it isn’t in conflict with the boring bossy bit that preceded it. It’s just argument and conclusion, and I don’t see the irony.”

  “You don’t see much, Miss Elphaba,” said Madame Morrible. “You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. To be stuck in ignorance, to be circumscribed by the walls of one’s own modest acumen, well, it is very sad in one so young and bright.” She spit out the last word, and it seemed to Galinda, somehow, a low comment on Elphaba’s skin color, which today was indeed lustrous with the effort of public speaking.

  “But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond,” said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up.

  “In the case of poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may indeed be true. Animals should not be heard,” snapped Madame Morrible.

  “Do you mean that ironically?” said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face, and did not look up again for the rest of the session.

  4

  When the second semester began, and Galinda was still saddled with Elphaba as a roomie, she made a brief protest to Madame Morrible. But the Head would allow no shifting, no rearranging. “Far too upsetting for my other girls,” she said. “Unless you’d like to be removed to the Pink Dormitory. Your Ama Clutch seems, to my watchful eye, to be recovering from the ailments you described when first we met. Perhaps now she is up to overseeing fifteen girls?”

  “No, no,” said Galinda quickly. “There are recurrences from time to time, but I don’t mention them. I don’t like to be a bother.”

  “How thoughtful,” said Madame Morrible. “Bless you, sweet thing. Now my dear, I wonder if we might take a moment, as long as you’ve come in for a chat, to discuss your academic plans for next fall? As you know, second year is when girls choose their specialties. Have you given it any thought?”

  “Very little,” said Galinda. “Frankly, I thought my talents would just emerge and make it clear whether I should try natural science, or the arts, or sorcery, or perhaps even history. I don’t think I’m cut out for ministerial work.”

  “I’m not surprised that one such as you should be in doubt,” said Madame Morrible, which wasn’t greatly encouraging to Galinda. “But may I suggest sorcery? You could be very good at it. I pride myself on knowing this sort of thing.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Galinda, though her early appetite for sorcery had waned once she’d heard what a grind it was to learn spells and, worse, to understand them.

  “In the event you choose sorcery, it might—just might—be possible to find for you a new roomie,” said Madame Morrible, “given that Miss Elphaba has already told me her interests lie in the natural sciences.”

  “Oh well then, I certainly will give it a great deal of thought,” said Galinda. She struggled with unnamed conflicts within her. Madame Morrible, for all her upper-class diction and fabulous wardrobe, seemed just a tad—oh—dangerous. As if her big public smile were composed of the light glancing off knives and lances, as if her deep voice masked the rumbling of distant explosions. Galinda always felt as if she couldn’t see the whole picture. It was disconcerting, and to her credit at least Galinda felt inside herself the ripping apart of some valuable fabric—was it integrity?—when she sat in Madame Morrible’s parlor and drank the perfect tea.

  “For the sister, I hear, is eventually coming up to Shiz,” concluded Madame Morrible a few minutes later, as if silence had not intervened, and several tasty biscuits, “because there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And that, I understand, would be dreadful. You would not like it. The sister being as she is. Undoubtedly spending much time in Miss Elphaba’s room, being tended to.” She smiled wanly. A puff of powdery aroma came forward from the flank of her neck, almost as if Madame Morrible could somehow dispense a pleasant personal odor at will.

  “The sister being as she is.” Madame Morrible tutted and wagged her head back and forth as she saw Galinda to the door. “Miserable, really, but I suppose we shall all pull together and cope. That is sorority, isn’t it?” The Head grasped her shawl and put a gentle hand on Galinda’s shoulder. Galinda shivered, and was sure Madame Morrible felt it, knew it, but the Head never registered a sign of it. “But then, my use of sorority—how ironic. Too witty. Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.” She squeezed Galinda’s shoulder blade as if it were a bicycle handle, almost harder than was proper for a woman to do. “We can only hope—ha ha—that the sister comes with some veils of her own! But that’s a year yet. Meanwhile we have time. Think about sorcery, would you? Do. Now good-bye, my pet, and fresh dreams.”

  Galinda walked back to her room slowly, wondering what Elphaba’s sister was like to provoke those catty remarks about veils. She wanted to ask Elphaba. But she couldn’t think of how to do it. She didn’t have the nerve.

  Boq

  3

  Come on out,” said the boys. “Come out.” They were leaning in the archway to Boq’s room, a pell-mell clot of them, backlit by the oil lamp in the study beyond. “We’re sick of books. Come with us.”

  “Can’t,” said Boq. “I’m behind in irrigation theory.”

  “Fuck your irrigation theory when the pubs are open,” said the strapping Gillikinese bucko named Avaric. “You’re not going to improve your grades at this late date, with the exams almost over and the examiners half-crocked themselves.”

  “It’s not the grades,” said Boq. “I just don’t understand it yet.”

  “We’re off to the pub, we’re off to the pub,” chanted some boys who, it seemed, had gotten a head start. “Fuck Boq, the ale is waiting, and it’s already aged enough!”

  “Which pub, then, maybe I’ll join you in an hour,” Boq said, sitting firmly back in his chair and not lifting his feet to the footstool, as he knew that this might incite his classmates to hoist him to their shoulders and carry him off with them for an evening of debauchery. His smallness seemed to inspire such banditry. Feet square on the floor made him look more planted, he figured.

  “The Boar and Fennel,” said Avaric. “They’ve got a new witch performing. They say she’s hot. She’s a Kumbric Witch.”

  “Hah,” said Boq, unconvinced. “Well, go on and get a good view. I’ll come along when I can.”

  The boys rambled away, rattling doors of other friends, knocking aslant the portraits of old boys now grown into august patrons. Avaric stood in the archway and waited a minute longer. “We might ditch some of the boors and take a select few of us off to the Philosophy Club,” he said enticingly. “Later on, I mean. It’s the weekend, after all.”

  “Oh, Avaric, go take a cold shower,” said Boq.

  “You admitted you were curious. You did. So why not an end-of-semester treat?”

  “I’m sorry I ever said I was curious. I’m curious about death, too, but I can wait to find out, thank you. Get lost, Avaric. Better go catch up with your friends. Enjoy the Kumbric antics, which by the way I expect is false advertising. Kumbric Witch talents went out hundreds of years ago. If indeed they ever existed.”

  Avaric turned up the second collar of his tunic-jacket. The inside was lined with a deep red velvet plush. Against his elegant shaven neck the lining seemed like a single ribbon of privilege. Boq found himself, once again, making mental comparisons between himself and handsome Avaric, and coming up—well, coming up short. “What, Avaric,” he said, as impatient with himself as he was with his friend.

  “Something has happened to you,” said Avaric. “I’m not that dull. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Boq.

  “Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go fuck myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. For you’re not that good a liar, and I’m not that stupid. Even for a dissipated Gillikinese of decaying
nobility.” His expression was soft, and Boq, momentarily, was tempted. His mouth opened as he thought of what to say, but at the sound of bells in Ozma Towers, chiming the hour, Avaric’s head turned just a fraction. For all his concern, Avaric wasn’t entirely here. Boq closed his mouth, thought some more, and said, “Call it Munchkinlander stolidity. I won’t lie, Avaric, you’re too good a friend to lie to. But there’s nothing to say now. Now go on and enjoy yourself. But be careful.” He was about to add a word of warning against the Philosophy Club, but checked it. If Avaric was annoyed enough, then Boq’s nannyish worrying might backfire and goad Avaric into going there.

  Avaric came forward and kissed him on both cheeks and on the forehead, an upper-class northern custom that always made Boq profoundly ill at ease. Then with a wink and a dirty gesture, he disappeared.

  Boq’s room looked out over a cobblestoned alley, down which Avaric and his cronies were swooping and weaving. Boq stood back, in the shadows, but needn’t have worried; his friends weren’t thinking of him now. They had made it through the halfway point in their exams and had a breather for a couple of days. After the exams, the campus would lie vacant except for the more befuddled of the professors and the poorer of the boys. Boq had lived through this before. He preferred study, however, to scrubbing old manuscripts with a five-haired teck-fur brush, which was what he would be employed to do in the Three Queens library all summer long.

  Across the alley ran the bluestone wall of a private stable, attached to some mansion house a few streets away on a fashionable square. Beyond the stable roof you could see the rounded tops of a few fruit trees, in the kitchen garden of Crage Hall, and above them glowed the lancet windows of the dormitories and classrooms. When the girls forgot to draw their drapes—which was astoundingly often—you could see them in various stages of undress. Never the whole body naked, of course; in that case he would have looked away, or told himself sternly that he had better. But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust. It was an education in lingerie if nothing else. Boq, who had no sisters, merely looked.