Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  “Mistress,” Julia said, “you know daytime is the time for things like that.” She shrugged. Nicole, even through her haze of fury, thought Julia might just have decided that her mistress was intermittently simpleminded and needed to be humored. “Of course,” Julia went on, “the daytime is when we’re busy, too. But there’ll be plays and beast shows in the amphitheater all summer long.”

  “Beast shows,” Nicole said, distracted almost out of her mood. So what were those? A traveling zoo, maybe? That would make sense, with no planes or trains or automobiles, and not much chance to go much of anywhere. It stood to reason that enterprising types might think to bring the zoos to the people, rather than the other way around.

  That didn’t help her immediate predicament. “What do I do now?” She sounded like a bored four-year-old, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it.

  “I still don’t know why you’re mad at Calidius Severus” — Julia shrugged again, as if to say she wasn’t and wouldn’t be responsible for Nicole’s vagaries — “but since you are, there isn’t much else to do but get drunk.”

  “No!” The answer was quick and sharp and automatic.

  “Well,” Julia said, “it’s one way not to notice the time crawling by. It’s here” — she held up a hand — “and then it’s there, and you don’t care what happened in between.”

  “No,” Nicole said again, remembering her father coming home plastered night after night. For the first time, she thought to wonder why he’d got drunk. Was he trying to blot out the time he spent in the factory every day? It wasn’t enough reason, but it was a reason. She’d never looked for a reason before; it had just been part of her life. She scratched her head, then wished she hadn’t — what was crawling through her hair?

  “You feel pretty good, too,” Julia went on, not really arguing with Nicole so much as reminding herself. “Oh, you may not feel so good the next morning, but who cares about the next morning? That’s then. This is now.” She looked longingly toward the long stone bar, as if to say she wouldn’t mind at all if she got drunk.

  “No,” Nicole said once more, but she heard something in her voice she’d never expected to find there: hesitation. She’d smoked marijuana a few times, at Indiana and afterwards. She would have enjoyed it more, she thought, if it hadn’t felt as if she were lighting smudge pots in her lungs. What could be so different about alcohol? She’d been drinking wine — watered wine, but wine — with meals, and she hadn’t turned into a lush.

  But your father did, said the stern voice in her mind. For the first time it sounded less authoritative than merely prim. Miss Priss, Frank had called her sometimes. At first it was affectionate, but later it gained an edge. Then he started adding, “You know, Nicole, people who preach like that usually do it because they’re afraid they’ll be tempted — and they’ll like it.” Not long after that, he was gone. Lady number two hadn’t ever been prim in her life, or sensible either.

  Nicole couldn’t help it if she was congenitally sensible. Maybe that good sense was what she needed now, instead of blind abhorrence. Dad drank boilermakers, for heaven’s sake. A few cups of wine don’t even come close.

  Do they?

  “Can’t do it all the time,” Julia said, “but everybody needs to get drunk once in a while.”

  Moderation in everything, including moderation. Nicole couldn’t remember where she’d heard that. She’d always thought it made good sense, but she’d never applied it to alcohol before. She’d been too busy running in the opposite direction — running away from the father figure, a therapist would say. So did it make sense now? God — gods — knew this wasn’t Los Angeles. Life here in Carnuntum was profoundly, sometimes unbearably, different.

  Gods, yes. Liber and Libera had, somehow, granted her wish, her whine, her prayer. They’d brought her to Carnuntum. They were, as she had discovered to her dismay, god and goddess of wine. What would they think, what would they do, if they realized how she felt about their very own and most protected substance? Or had they known all along, and set her up for just this dilemma?

  Hadn’t Christianity turned a lot of the old gods into devils? Right now, Nicole could see why. But she hadn’t felt anything bad in Liber or Libera, not in their faces on the plaque and not in the way they’d granted her prayer. So maybe it was a creeping evil — or maybe it was simple godlike benevolence. Be careful what you wish for, she’d heard said: you might get it.

  She was, she knew, talking herself into something she would have rejected in horror a few days — or, heavens, was it weeks? — before. She had rejected wine, and what had that got her? A case of the runs that almost turned her inside out, and derision from everybody who heard about her drinking water.

  “Well, maybe,” she heard herself say. “Maybe it’ll get the taste of that cursed clerk out of my mouth.” An excuse, an alibi — she knew as much. She also knew life was a bore, and an unpleasant bore at that.

  Julia must have had a much more solid understanding of that than she did. The slave went over to the bar and filled two cups with wine, brought them back, and plunked one on the table in front of Nicole. Nicole stared at it. It was one of the cups she filled and washed and filled again all day long, brimful of the middle-grade wine. That was boldness on Julia’s part, mixed with prudence: not the cheap stuff if they were going to drink it neat, but not the expensive stuff either, since they were going to drink a lot.

  Nicole reached out a hand that was gratifyingly steady and lifted the cup. With the same deep breath she’d have drawn just before she jumped into a lake of cold water, she touched it to her lips and sipped.

  The wine wasn’t watered; they wanted it full strength, to get drunk the faster. It was almost as thick as syrup, and almost as sweet, too. But under that sweetness lay the half-medicinal, half-terrifying taste of alcohol.

  Julia sighed and set down her own, emptied cup. “That’s so good,” she said. Her voice was low, throaty, sensuous. She might have been talking about something quite other than wine.

  “Yes,” Nicole said, although she didn’t think it was particularly grand. Warmth filled her belly and spread slowly outward.

  Julia tilted back her cup to catch the last of the wine, then rose to refill it. Politely, she picked up Nicole’s, too, only to set it down and give Nicole a look the dim lamplight only made more reproachful. “You haven’t finished yet, Mistress?” Beneath the words lay others: what are you waiting for?

  What was Nicole waiting for? If she was going to do this, she wasn’t going to do it halfway. She gulped down the wine — dizzied, half staggered, nearly ready to gag on the fumes and the sweetness, but by damn she did it. She thrust the cup at Julia. Julia nodded approval, filled it up again, brought it back.

  That one Nicole drained as fast as she could. “You haven’t finished yet, Julia?” she said, and laughed. It sounded too loud, as if she’d turned up the volume by mistake.

  Julia laughed, too. Was she laughing because she thought it was funny, or because her owner had made a joke? Damn, Nicole thought. Her thoughts were turned up high, too. I don’t care. Tomorrow I’ll care. Not tonight. No. Not tonight.

  A swallow or two later, or maybe it was three, Nicole touched the tip of her nose. It seemed to have gone numb. That was funny — not big-laugh funny, not giggle funny. Funny funny. I am getting drunk, she thought. It was wonderful. Marvelous. Fascinating.

  And it was her turn to fill the cups. Getting up wasn’t bad, though the floor tilted underfoot. Walking straight was harder. Yes. Officer, she thought, I’m walking under the influence. She giggled.

  So did Julia. If she found anything out of the ordinary in sitting down with her mistress and getting plastered, she didn’t let on. Nicole wondered how often she’d done it with Umma. As Nicole carried the wine back to the table, walking with great care so as not to spill it, she almost came right out and asked. She caught herself in the nick of time. Alcohol, she thought clearly and — all right, primly — makes you want to talk before you think.
Such a clear thought, and so wise. She was proud of it.

  If she hadn’t learned about talking jags from experience — if she hadn’t already had a good notion of them from memories of her father and from what she’d seen in the tavern — Julia would have taught her. The slave’s mouth ran and ran and ran.

  Nicole had learned a long time ago that nodding every once in a while was enough to keep a drunk — in this case, Julia — going. Some of what the slave said was interesting in a lurid sort of way; Nicole found out more than she wanted to know about the intimate preferences of several of her regular customers. The one who liked his boys sweet and young, for example — the younger the better; and the one who’d buried or divorced three wives, not one of whom had ever given him an heir, because he couldn’t bring himself to enter them through the proper orifice; and…

  And then Julia said, “Mistress, if Titus is even half as good as Gaius, you won’t find much finer anywhere you look. He’s probably better, too — I bet he wouldn’t be in such a hurry all the time. “ She sighed gustily. “And besides, Mistress, he’s crazy about you. And you’re angry at him. What did he do to get you in such an uproar? I never have been able to figure it out.”

  Her calling the two Calidii Severi by their praenomens left Nicole confused for a moment, but not for any longer than that. One thing was interesting: If Julia wondered what Titus Calidius Severus was like in bed, he’d never put down a couple of sesterces and gone upstairs with her when Umma was out shopping and the kids had gone off to play somewhere. A point of sorts for the fuller and dyer. Though a point for what, in what game, Nicole wasn’t inclined to say.

  Julia still waited expectantly for her answer. She chose her words with care. With all the wine she had in her, she, unlike Julia, couldn’t have spoken quickly if she’d wanted to. “It’s not any one thing,” she said. “It’s not any big thing, even. We just haven’t been getting along as well as we did before, that’s all.”

  “It’s too bad,” Julia said. In the dim lamplight, Nicole was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “The children really like him, too.”

  “Children or no children, if you think I’ll have anything to do with a man who smells like sour piss all the time, you can think again,” Nicole snapped — or rather, the wine did it, before she could stop herself.

  That wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t even most of the story. But the wine could have done much worse. It was a part of the story that would make sense to Julia, and apparently did. She nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve been fussy about things like that lately, haven’t you, Mistress? I’ve seen you throw out a couple of pieces of meat we could have served without having anybody complain, or not much, anyhow.”

  “If it smells bad to me, it’ll smell bad to the cush — customers,” Nicole said. How wonderful: she’d got Julia to stop talking about Titus Calidius Severus. She laughed with the wonder of it.

  When she looked at the lamp, she saw two side by side unless she screwed up her eyes and tilted her head just so. Getting up required a distinct effort of will. “I’m going to bed,” she announced with a grand flourish that nearly sent her over onto her backside — and did send her into a fit of the giggles. Two blurry Julias nodded vigorously and gulped down all the wine in their cups before they trotted along after her like obedient puppies.

  Nicole had danced to the music of the wine — had she ever. And come morning, she paid the piper.

  She’d felt worse her first night in Carnuntum, when her day of water-drinking caught up with her, but not by much. That had been concentrated misery, too: bowels in an uproar, but the rest of her not so bad. Now she hurt all over.

  She sat up with excruciating slowness. If she moved one bit faster, her head would fall off. Just as she achieved a wobbly vertical, an oxcart with an ungreased axle squeaked and groaned down the street in front of the tavern. She held her head on her shoulders with both hands, and suppressed a groan that would have made it ache even worse. No wonder her father used to complain that her mother was scrambling the breakfast eggs too loudly. If she’d known then what she knew now, she’d never have laughed.

  Her mouth tasted as if she’d been drinking from the chamberpot instead of a wine cup. What she wouldn’t have given for a bottle of Scope or a tube of Crest with toothbrush to match — and a dentist on call while she was at it. Her bad tooth ached worse than it ever had before.

  So that’s what a hangover is, she thought. Every nerve ending turned up high. Every sensation more intense than usual. A lot more intense. A hell of a lot more intense.

  Sunlight streamed in through the open window. She would have been willing to swear it was the same watery sunshine she’d always seen in Carnuntum, but her eyes blinked and watered and ached as if it had been the fierce glare of the Sahara. She yearned for sunglasses — one more lifesaving idea no one in Carnuntum had ever had.

  When she first came to Carnuntum, she’d told herself — and believed — that the loss of material things didn’t matter. She’d traded them for genuine equality: a good enough bargain, all things considered. Since then, she’d learned just how far off the mark she’d been. She’d lost all the little things that made life easier, and got in return less equality than she’d ever imagined possible, and almost as much sheer aggravation as she’d seen in the twentieth century. That’s not a bargain, she thought nastily. That’s a consumer complaint.

  So where did she go to file? Was there a consumer protection bureau for victims of unscrupulous gods?

  Her guts rumbled. They were happier than they’d been that first night, but they weren’t dancing in the daisies, either. She was glad, once she’d used the chamberpot, to fling its reeking contents out the window.

  An irate shout rose from the alley. A laugh shook itself out of her — and half killed her head, too. Damn, she thought, half in horrified embarrassment; but only half. Now there was a hazard of urban life no one in Los Angeles had to worry about.

  On mornings when he was feeling the worse for wear, her father had dosed himself with aspirin and black coffee. No coffee here; she’d found that out the hard way. Would that willow-bark decoction make the rock drummer in her head stop his demented solo? What did the Romans do about hangovers — besides suffer, that is?

  She got up: slowly, because her whole body ached, as if from a low-grade flu. When she looked in the polished bronze mirror in her makeup kit, she winced. Eyes like two pissholes in the snow, her mother had said of her father on mornings after he’d come reeling back late from another foray against the bottle. She’d been too young then to understand what that meant. Now here they were, staring back at her: two reddish-yellow holes in a flat white face.

  She couldn’t just sit here wishing she were dead. There was money to earn: bread to bake, food to cook and serve, wine to ladle out into waiting cups. It didn’t, at the moment, seem any more appealing than sucking up to fat assholes of law partners. A couple of weeks in the tavern business had shown her all too clearly that, while a woman could make a living at it, she wasn’t going to retire to the Riviera any time soon.

  The loss of a day’s proceeds would hurt.

  Inspiration struck. She winced. Julia! Julia could run the tavern. She usually did anyway, more than Nicole hoped she knew.

  No. Nicole winced again. That wouldn’t do, not for more than a few hours. Some things — the cash box, for example — had to stay under Nicole’s supervision. And it really took two to run the tavern properly; actually they could have used a third pair of hands, even with the kids’ intermittent help.

  No real help for it. Running a tavern in any era was no easy nine-to-five. Sunup to sundown, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, no paid vacations — and no sick leave. She had to get herself out there and get to work. If she looked like grim death… she did, that was all. She’d had plenty of customers who looked the same way, and for the same reasons, too.

  Julia was already downstairs, getting things ready for a new day. To Nicole’s guilty relief, Julia,
who was normally resilient to the point of perkiness, looked as if she’d been ridden hard and put away wet, too.

  “Hello, Mistress.” Julia managed a smile, but it was wan. “Now we remember why getting drunk all the time isn’t such a good idea.”

  “What, you needed reminding?” Nicole said — not too loud; her own voice hurt her ears. Julia, she noticed, hadn’t opened the shutters. Nicole didn’t blame her one bit. The light creeping between the wooden slats already seemed bright enough to blind a person.

  Another cart banged and rattled along the street outside. Nicole and Julia winced in unison. Aspirin, Nicole wished with all her heart. Coffee. Of course they didn’t materialize. She’d run fresh out of wishes when she wished herself back in time to Carnuntum. “What do we do about this?” she moaned… quietly.

  “I ate some raw cabbage,” Julia said, “and I drank a little wine — not too much, by the gods!” Her sigh was mournful. “Hasn’t done much good yet.”

  “Raw cabbage?” Nicole sighed just as Julia had, gustily. “I’ll try some, too — and a tiny bit of wine.” She held thumb and forefinger close together.

  She wasn’t fond of raw cabbage to begin with. She was even less fond of it after she’d choked down a handful of leaves. Her stomach asked, loudly and pointedly, what the hell she thought she was doing to it. Maybe the idea behind this particular hangover cure was to make you feel miserable somewhere else, so you wouldn’t worry about your head falling off. If that was the case — she’d rather carry her head around under her arm than deal with a stomach in open revolt.

  She also discovered that, if there was any one thing in the world wine didn’t go with, raw cabbage was it.