Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  Household Gods

  Judith Tarr

  Harry Turtledove

  Judith Tarr, Harry Turtledove

  Household Gods

  1

  Nicole Gunther-Perrin rolled over to turn off the alarm clock and found herself nose to nose with two Roman gods. She nodded a familiar good-morning to Liber and his consort Libera, whose votive plaque had stood on the nightstand since her honeymoon in Vienna. Maybe they nodded back. Maybe she was still half asleep.

  As she dragged herself up to wake the children and get them ready for daycare, her mouth twisted. Liber and Libera were still with her. Frank Perrin, however…

  “Bastard, “ she said. Liber and Libera didn’t look surprised. They’d heard it every morning since her ex-husband took half the assets, left the kids, and headed off for bluer horizons. She doubted he thought about her except when the child support came due (and not often enough then), or when she called him with a problem. She couldn’t help thinking of him a dozen times a day — and every time she looked at Justin. Her son — their son, if you wanted to get technical — looked just like him. Same rough dark hair, down to the uncombable cowlick; same dark eyes you could drown in; same shy little smile that made you feel you’d coaxed it out of hiding.

  Justin smiled it as she gently shook him awake. “Mommy!” he said. He was only two and a half. He hadn’t learned to wound her yet.

  “Come on, Tiger,” she said in her best rise-and-shine, mommy-in-the-morning voice. “We’ve got another day ahead of us.” She reached inside his Pull-Ups. “You’re dry! What a good boy! Go on and go potty while I get your sister up.”

  He climbed onto the rail and jumped out of bed. He landed with a splat, of course, but it didn’t hurt him. It made him laugh. He toddled off sturdily toward the bathroom. Watching him go, Nicole shook her head. Kimberley never jumped out of bed. Testosterone poisoning, Nicole thought, and almost smiled.

  Kimberley not only didn’t jump out of bed, she didn’t want to get out of bed at all. She clutched her stuffed bobcat and refused to open her eyes. She was like that about every other morning; given her druthers, she would have slept till noon. She didn’t have her druthers, not on a Tuesday. “You’ve got to get up, sweetie,” Nicole said with determined patience.

  Eyes still resolutely closed, Kimberley shook her head. Her light brown hair, almost the same color as Nicole’s, streamed over her face like seaweed.

  Nicole wheeled out the heavy guns: “Your brother is already up. You’re a big four-year-old. You can do what he does, can’t you?” If she’d used such shameless tactics in court, counsel for the other side would have screamed his head off, and the judge would have sustained him.

  But she wasn’t in court, and there was no law that said she had to be completely fair with a small and relentlessly sleepy child. She did what she had to do, and did it with a minimum of remorse.

  It worked. Kimberley opened her eyes. They were hazel, halfway between Frank’s brown and Nicole’s green. Still clutching her beloved Scratchy, Kimberley headed for the bathroom. Nicole nodded to herself and sighed. Her daughter wasn’t likely to say anything much for the next little while, but once she got moving, she moved pretty well.

  Nicole got moving, too, toward the kitchen. Her brain was running ahead of her, kicked up into full daytime gear. She’d get the kids’ breakfasts ready, get dressed herself while they ate, listen to the news on the radio while she was doing that so she could find out what traffic was like (traffic in Indianapolis had not prepared her for L.A., not even slightly), and then…

  And then, for the first time that day, her plans started to unravel. Normally silent Kimberley let out a shrill screech: “Ewwww!” Then came the inevitable, “Mommmmy!” Ritual satisfied, Kimberley deigned to explain what was actually wrong: “Justin tinkled all over the bathroom floor and I stepped in it. Eww! Eww! Eww!” More ewws might have followed that last one, but, if so, only dogs could hear them.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Nicole burst out; and under her breath, succinctly and satisfyingly if not precisely accurately, “Shit.”

  The bathroom was in the usual morning shambles, with additions. She tried to stay calm. “Justin,” she said in the tone of perfect reason recommended by all the best child psychologists and riot-control experts, “if you go potty the way big boys do, you have to remember to stand on the stepstool so the tinkle goes in the potty like it’s supposed to.”

  Children raised in psychologists’ laboratories, or rioting mobs, might have stopped to listen. Her own offspring were oblivious. “Mommy!” Kimberley kept screaming. “Wash my feet!” Justin was laughing so hard he looked ready to fall down, though not, she noticed, into the puddle that had sent Kimberley into such hysterics. He thought his big sister in conniptions was the funniest thing in the world — which meant he’d probably pee all over the floor again sometime soon, to make Kimberley pitch another fit.

  Nicole gave up on psychology and settled for basic hygiene. She coaxed the still shrieking Kimberley over to the tub and got her feet washed, three times, with soap. Then, with Kimberley hopping on one foot and screeching, “Another time, Mommy! I’m still dirty! I smell bad! Mommy, do it again!”

  Nicole got the wriggling, giggling Justin out of his wet pajama bottoms and the pulled-down Pull-Ups he was still wearing at half mast. She washed his feet, too, on general principles, and his legs. He’d stopped giggling and started chanting: “Tinkle-Kim! Tinkle-Kim!” — which would have set Kimberley off again if she’d ever stopped.

  Nicole’s head was ringing. She would be calm, she told herself. She must be calm. A good mother never lost her cool. A good mother never raised her voice. A good mother -

  She had to raise her voice. She wouldn’t be heard otherwise. “Go out in the hall, both of you!” she bellowed into sudden, unexpected silence, as Kimberley finally stopped for breath. She added, just too late: “Step around the puddle!”

  Something in her face must have got through Justin’s high glee. He was very, very quiet as she washed his feet again, his big brown eyes fixed on her face. From invisible foot-washer to Mommy Monster in five not-so-easy seconds. She took advantage of it to send him out to the kitchen. Unfair advantage. Bad parenting. Blissful, peaceful quiet.

  “Guilty as charged, Your Honor,” she said.

  While she was cleaning up the mess, she got piss on one knee of her thirty-five-dollar, lace-trimmed, rose-printed sweats — Victoria’s Secret called them “thermal pyjamas,” which must have been a step up the sexiness scale from sweats, but sweats they were, and sweats Nicole called them.

  She emerged somewhat less than triumphant and wrapped in the ratty old bathrobe that hung on the back of the door, to find Kimberley, who still hadn’t had a chance to go to the bathroom, hopping up and down in the hallway. At least she was quiet, though she dashed past Nicole with a theatrical sigh of relief.

  Ten minutes wasted, ten minutes Nicole didn’t have. She popped waffles in the toaster, stood tapping her foot till they were done, poured syrup over them, poured milk (Justin’s in a Tommee Tippee cup, so he’d have a harder time spilling that on the floor), and settled the kids down — she hoped — for breakfast. Justin was still bare-ass. He laughed at the way his bottom felt on the smooth vinyl of the high chair.

  As she turned on Sesame Street, Nicole muttered what was half a prayer: “Five minutes’ peace.” She hurried back past the study into her own bedroom to dress. About halfway into her pantyhose (control tops, because at thirty-four she was getting a little round in the middle and she didn’t have time to exercise — she didn’t have time for anything), Kimberley’s voice rose once again to a banshee shriek. “Mom-meeeee! Justin’s got syrup in his hair!”

 
Nicole felt her nail poke into the stockings as she yanked them all the way up. She looked down. Sure as hell, a run, a killer run, a ladder from ankle to thigh. She threw the robe back around herself, ran out to the kitchen, surveyed the damage — repaired it at top speed, with a glance at the green unblinking eye of the microwave-oven clock. Five more minutes she didn’t have.

  Once back in the dubious sanctuary of her bedroom, she took another ten seconds of overdraft to stop, breathe, calm down. Her hands were gratifyingly steady as she found and put on a new pair of hose, a white blouse, and a dark green pinstripe suit that not only looked professional but also, she hoped, played up her eyes. The skirt was a bit snug but would do; she’d go easy on the Danish this morning, and leave the sugar out of her coffee — if she got the chance to eat at all. She slid into mocha pumps, pinned on an opal brooch and put in the earrings that went with it, and checked the effect. Not bad, but she was late, late, late. She still had to get the kids dressed, put on her makeup, and maybe even grab breakfast for herself. She was past morning mode by now, past even Panic Overdrive, and into dead, cold calm.

  Kimberley knew she didn’t want to wear the Magic Mountain sweatshirt Nicole had picked out for her, but had no idea what she did want. Nicole had hoped to hold onto her desperate calm, but that drove her over the edge. “You figure it out,” she snapped, and left Kimberley to it while she went to deal with Justin. He didn’t care what he wore. Whatever it was, getting him into it was a wrestling match better suited to Hulk Hogan than a working mother.

  After Nicole pinned him and dressed him, she went in search of Kimberley. Her daughter hadn’t moved. She was still standing in the middle of her pink-and-white bedroom, in her underwear, staring at a tangled assortment of shirts, pants, shorts, and skirts. Nicole felt her hands twitch in an almost irresistible urge to slap. She forced herself to stop and draw a breath, to speak reasonably if firmly. “We don’t have any more time to waste, young lady.” In spite of her best efforts, her voice rose. “Here. This shirt. These pants. Now.”

  Sullenly, Kimberley put them on. “I hate you,” she said, and then, as if that had been a rehearsal, found something worse: “Daddy and Dawn never yell at me.”

  Only four, and she knew just where to stick the knife.

  Nicole stalked out of her daughter’s bedroom, tight-lipped and quivering with rage she refused to show. As she strode past the nightstand on her way into the master bathroom, she glared at Liber and Libera — especially at Liber. The god and goddess, their hair cut in almost identical pageboy bobs, stared serenely back, as they had for… how long?

  She grasped at that thought — any straw in a storm, any distraction before she lost it completely. The label on the back of the limestone plaque said in German, English, and French that it was a reproduction of an original excavated from the ruins of Carnuntum, the Roman city on the site of Petronell, the small town east of Vienna where she’d bought it. Every now and then, she wondered about that. None of the other reproductions in the shop had looked quite so… antique. But none of the Customs men had given her any grief about it. If they didn’t know, who did?

  As a distraction, it was a failure. When she stood in front of the makeup mirror, the modern world came crashing back. Fury had left her cheeks so red, she almost decided to leave off the blusher. But she knew what would happen next: the blood would drain away and leave them pasty white, and she’d look worse than ever. When she’d done the best she could with foundation and blusher, eyeliner and mascara and eyebrow pencil, lip liner and lipstick, she surveyed the results with a critical eye. Even with the help of modern cosmetology, her face was still too round — doughy, if you got right down to it. Anyone could guess she was a schnitzel-eater from a long line of schnitzel-eaters. She was starting to get a double chin, to go with the belly she had to work a little harder each year to disguise with suit jackets and shirtdresses and carefully cut slacks. And — what joy! — she was getting a pimple, too, right in the middle of her chin, a sure sign her period was on the way.

  ‘Thirty-four years old, and I’ve got zits,” she said to nobody in particular. God wasn’t listening, that was plain. She camouflaged the damage as best she could, corralled the kids, and headed out to the car.

  The Honda coughed several times before reluctantly kicking over. If Frank had got the last child-support check to her, or the one before that, she’d have had it tuned. As things were — as things were, she gritted her teeth. She was a lawyer. She was supposed to be making good money. She was making good money, by every national standard, but food and daycare and clothes and insurance and utilities and the mortgage ate it all up and then some.

  House payments in Indianapolis hadn’t prepared her for Los Angeles, either. With two incomes, they were doable. Without two incomes…

  “Yay! Off to Josefina’s,” Kimberley said when they pulled out of the driveway. Apparently, she’d forgotten she hated her mother.

  Nicole wished she could forget as easily as that herself. “Off to Josefina’s,” she echoed with considerably less enthusiasm. She lived in West Hills, maybe ten minutes away from the splendidly multicultural law offices of Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng. The daycare provider, however, was over in Van Nuys, halfway across the San Fernando Valley.

  That hadn’t been a problem when Nicole was married. Frank would drop off the kids, then head down the San Diego Freeway to the computer-science classes he taught at UCLA. He’d pick Kimberley and Justin up in the evening, too. Everything was great. Josefina was wonderful, the kids loved her, Nicole got an extra half-hour every morning to drink her coffee and brace herself for the day.

  Now that Frank didn’t live there anymore, Nicole had to drive twenty minutes in the direction opposite the one that would have taken her to work, then hustle back across the Valley to the Woodland Hills office. After she got off, she made the same trip in reverse. No wonder the Honda needed a tuneup. Nicole kept wanting to try to find someone closer, preferably on the way to work, but the kids screamed every time she suggested it, and there never seemed to be time. So she kept taking them to Josefina’s, and the Honda kept complaining, and she kept scrambling, morning after morning and evening after evening. Someday the Honda would break down and she’d scream loud enough to drown out the kids, and then she’d get around to finding someone else to take care of them while she went about earning a living.

  She turned left onto Victory and headed east. Sometimes you could make really good time on Victory, almost as good as on the freeway — the freeway when it wasn’t jammed, of course; the eastbound 101 during morning rush hour didn’t bear thinking about. She hoped this would be one of those times; she was still running late.

  She sailed past the parking lots of the Fallbrook Mall and the more upscale Topanga Plaza. Both were acres of empty asphalt now. They wouldn’t slow her down till she came home tonight. Her hands tightened on the wheel as she came up to Pierce College. Things often jammed there in the morning, with people heading for early classes. Some of the kids drove like maniacs, too, and got into wrecks that snarled traffic for a mile in either direction.

  Not today, though. “Victory,” Nicole breathed: half street name, half triumph. Victory wasn’t like Sherman Way, with a traffic light every short block. Clear sailing till just before the freeway, she thought. She rolled by one gas station, apartment house, condo block, and strip mall with video store or copy place or small-time accountant’s office or baseball-card shop or Mexican or Thai or Chinese or Korean or Indian or Armenian restaurant after another, in continual and polyglot confusion. They had a flat and faintly unreal look in the trafficless morning, under the blue California sky.

  Six years and she could still marvel at the way the light came down straight and white and hard, with an edge to it that she could taste in the back of her throat. Good solid Los Angeles smog, pressed down hard by the sun: air you could cut pieces off and eat. She’d thought she’d never be able to breathe it, gone around with a stitch in her side and a
catch in her lungs, till one day she woke up and realized she hadn’t felt like that in weeks. She’d whooped, which woke up Frank; then she’d had to explain: “I’m an Angeleno now! I can breathe the smog.”

  Frank hadn’t understood. He’d just eyed her warily and grunted and gone to take over the bathroom the way he did every morning.

  She should have seen the end then, but it had taken another couple of years and numerous further signs — then he was gone and she was a statistic. Divorced wife, mother of two.

  She came back to the here-and-now just past White Oak, just as everything on the south side of the street turned green. The long rolling stretch of parkland took her back all over again to the Midwest — to the place she’d taught herself to stop calling home. There, she’d taken green for granted. Here, in Southern California, green was a miracle and a gift. Eight months a year, any landscape that wasn’t irrigated stretched bare and bleak and brown. Rain seldom fell. Rivers were few and far between. This was desert — rather to the astonishment of most transplants, who’d expected sun and surf and palm trees, but never realized how dry the land was beyond the beaches.

  There was actually a river here, the Los Angeles River, running through the park. But the L.A. River, even the brief stretch of it not encased in concrete, would hardly have passed for a creek in Indiana. She shut down a surge of homesickness so strong it caught her by surprise. “Damn,” she said softly — too soft, apparently, for the kids to hear: no voice piped up from the back, no “Damn what, Mommy?” from Justin and no prim “We don’t use bad words, Mommy,” from Kimberley. She’d thought she was long past yearning for Indiana. What was there to yearn for? Narrow minds and narrower mindsets, freezing cold in the winter and choking humidity in the summer, and thousands of miles to the nearest ocean.

  And green. Green grass and bare naked water, and air that didn’t rake the lungs raw.