Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Who promised you?” Faye asked, jeering. “I don’t remember your saying you promised you.”

  Carolyn paused woozily, trying to remember who had promised her to Albert. “I don’t know,” she confessed with a pixilated giggle. “He’s just … he’s always been there. I don’t want Albert, but I guess I think I will want Albert, because everyone always tells me I’ll want Albert.”

  “You know what they’re doing to you, don’t you?” Faye asked, her voice slurred velvet, furry at the edges from the punch they’d all drunk. “They’re cutting and pasting you, Car-o-line. They’re taking everything that pleasures you and cutting it off. There’s a thing they do to girls in Africa, cutting off they little clits so they can’t ever get any pleasure there. It’s a mutilation. Maybe yours dohn hurt so much right now, but it’s the same thing. That’s what they’re doing to you. Mutilation.”

  The word was only a word, but it stayed with Carolyn like a mantra. She told herself later it was just that she was drunk, very un-Crespinly drunk, so drunk she hadn’t even been offended by Faye’s vulgar language, but it wasn’t only that. It was true. The aunts were trying to mutilate her, and so was Albert. It was a revelation. Damn the aunts. Damn Albert.

  The conversation went on to other things, and during all of it Sophy listened and listened, very much, Carolyn thought, like an anthropologist in a native encampment, her ears positively quivering.

  “Where were you brought up?” Carolyn asked her during a lull in the conversation.

  “Oh, here and there,” Sophy said, flushing a little. “Nowhere in particular.”

  “Country or city?”

  “Oh, country! Yes, very rural, my people. My upbringing was all very ordinary and dull, really. Farm life is very much the same from day to day. That’s why I’m so excited about being here, learning all your stories.”

  “Our stories?” Carolyn laughed. “We don’t even have stories.”

  “Oh, you do! You’ve been telling them tonight! I want to hear everything, all about you, all about women everywhere.…”

  She gave a similar answer every time they asked about her. Sometimes she looked uncomfortable, sometimes she smiled, but she never said anything definite. Carolyn thought she was probably part European, part Native American, or even South American, basing that idea on the panpipes Sophy sometimes played—a very Andean instrument. Jessamine remarked that Sophy played the drum, too, which was Indian or maybe Asian. They asked Agnes, who, being Sophy’s roommate, should know, but Agnes only shrugged. “She won’t tell me. She meditates sometimes, usually early in the morning. She says she’s invoking a guardian spirit, but that’s all she’ll say.”

  In anyone else it would have been infuriating. In anyone else it would have led to suspicion, or ill feeling. In Sophy it was part of her charm. Her drumming and piping were mysterious, her meditative exercises unfathomable, but they were part of Sophy, whom they loved, even though they did not understand her. They particularly did not understand why Sophy was constantly so troubled over men.

  The defining incident happened in early November. Despite Faye’s marvelous voice, she wanted a career in art, not music, and even so early in her studies she visualized things as artworks. This defining incident was remembered as a painting—perhaps of the Dutch or Flemish school, dramatically sidelit: Interior with Figures. The interior was the room that she and Sophy shared, full of the golden light of an autumn afternoon, amber sun-fingers reaching toward dark corners and along dusky walls. The figures were themselves: Carolyn crouched on the window seat, the slanting light making a ruddy aureole of her hair, the dorm cat sprawled bonelessly across her lap. Faye herself, wild hair bushing upward, walnut skin, eyes glittering like a jungle creature, catching glimpses of herself in the mirror as she stalked back and forth. Ophy, heaped on a corner of the bed like a disjointed marionette, wide mouth pulled into a jester’s gape. And Agnes, sitting solemnly, straight-legged, against the door, staring at the trio before the mirror: Jessamine’s sleek olive-brown presence at one side, Bettiann’s tousled blondness at the other, and between them, staring into the mirror as into a crystal ball, Sophy.

  She was like a rising star, lovely as the morning. Where had she come by that lovesome body, that perfect face? Doe-eyed Sophy. Night-haired Sophy. Sweet-lipped Sophy. Close-mouthed Sophy.

  Sophy at that particular moment with swollen eyes, an angry mouth, and burning cheeks. “What do I say to discourage him?” she cried into the mirror at their reflected presences. “Think of something.”

  Ophy threw up her hands. “Sophy, he’s the best catch in the whole school! He’s good-looking. He’s rich! Have you seen that car of his? Besides, he didn’t try to rape you! All he asked you to do was go on a date with him!”

  Sophy’s head went down, her eyes spilling, while Agnes sprang to her roommate’s defense.

  “What he wants isn’t the point. Sophy doesn’t want to go on a date. That’s the point. She doesn’t want to be asked to go. That’s the point. She doesn’t want to be begged, harassed, chivied, or wooed. She wants to be let alone.”

  “Then she should have gone to a religious college,” opined Bettiann. “Or some girl’s school.”

  “My … my scholarship was to this place!” cried Sophy, tested past endurance. “I didn’t have a choice!”

  There was a metallic quality to her voice, rather like a hammer striking an anvil to make first a clang, then a lingering reverberation that faded slowly into silence, an inhuman hardness coupled with an all-too-human desperation, as though two people … two creatures spoke at once. Faye stopped pacing; Ophy stopped grinning; Carolyn’s stroking hand stilled. Even the lazy cat looked up, suddenly alert to a tension, a presence in the room that had not been there a moment ago. They all ceased breathing as they searched Sophy’s tear-streaked face staring at them from the mirror, surprised to see only her face when that Gorgon’s voice should have come from another, more terrible creature.

  In later years Carolyn occasionally wakened from a sound sleep or turned from a present task, thinking she had heard the clang of that voice, like the door of a distant vault being closed, shutting something in, or out, a ringing adamant, weighty as fate itself. Yet, so she told herself, the sound was not unnatural. It had force, like the roaring of cataracts or the spume of a geyser, and it was earthly, not alien. So she felt when they heard that voice for the first time, when Sophy cried woe into the mirror:

  “I don’t want men to ask me out. I don’t want them to think of me that way. I can feel their thoughts. It’s like being raped inside their heads, little pieces of me ripped off and taken into them, used up. I want them not to think of me, not to discuss me, not to make bets with each other, can they get me to go out with them, can they kiss me, can they take me to bed!”

  A silence came while the reverberations stilled. Then Bettiann said:

  “It’s only words and thoughts, Sophy. Words can’t hurt you.”

  “Words can’t hurt?” Sophy cried. “Why do you believe they can’t? Words have hurt all of us! It’s your mother’s words that make you throw up your dinner almost every night, Bettiann. Words made you believe you’re unattractive, Aggie! Words may make you marry a man you don’t love, Carolyn! Words are as powerful as weapons, as useful as tools. They can injure like a flung stone, cut like a knife, batter like a club. They can open heaven or they can ruin and destroy!”

  “Shh, now,” Carolyn cried in sudden inexplicable terror, afraid to let silence settle upon that outcry, afraid to let it go on to another word, phrase, sentence. That voice, that particular voice of Sophy’s, had to be stilled, quieted, put at rest, or it could destroy them. “You don’t need to fight with us, Sophy. We’re with you. Just explain what you mean.”

  Sophy wiped the tears angrily, using the back of her hand. “I … look at the lives of those who are greatly desired. I see pretty girls who burn hot, with sunny faces, their bodies like flame. They sing. They dance. They appear on the covers of magazines. I ask my
self if it is merely coincidence that so many of them have such great troubles, so many die so young. It is as if they are eaten up alive, their souls nibbled away by all those who have fantasized about them, leered at them, used words and thoughts on them. In my people’s stories maidens lean against the dragon’s great scaled side under the shelter of a wing and learn secrets. In your stories maidens are chained to a stake for the dragon to burn or devour! The maiden may be mythical and the dragon invisible, but there is still truth in that. I don’t want your dragons devouring me.”

  Agnes, lost, ventured, “Like … when someone takes a picture of a primitive person? They’re stealing the soul?”

  “Like that, perhaps,” said Sophy, shaking her head in confusion. “If you cannot feel it as I do, then pretend for my sake that it’s real. Pretend it’s possible. I don’t want them using me that way.”

  Carolyn nodded. “Then you want to be invisible.”

  “Exactly,” Sophy whispered. “Oh, if I could be invisible.”

  Carolyn rose to her feet, hands on hips, jaw jutted. “Then we’ll help you become so.”

  It took the others a few moments to catch up with her.

  “She doesn’t have to be beautiful,” Carolyn said scornfully in the face of their doubt. “No law says she has to be beautiful.”

  And she gathered the five of them up into her hands like a deck of cards and dealt them out again: You go here, you go there, fetch this, fetch that, supervising Sophy’s makeover without a moment’s hesitation. Clothing first, baggy skirts and too-large tops, shapeless and of indeterminate colors, borrowed from Carolyn herself; a little liquid makeup on the lips and brows, fading them into the face; a little more on the lashes, making her eyes look bald. Faye saw to that. Hair pulled straight back into a knot, Bettiann’s contribution. A touch of olive base, Jessamine’s, to take the bloom from those cheeks. Ophy provided the glasses, frames only at first.

  It was Agnes who suggested the book. “You need a heavy book,” she said. “You can carry it up against your chest and walk sort of bent over. You’ll look like a brain, armed with the shield and buckler of the female intelligentsia.”

  “I’ve got a thick book,” said Jessamine. “I found it in the bottom of the cupboard in my room, with about fifty years’ worth of dust on it. I’ll get it.”

  She returned moments later bearing Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume one. An old leather-bound library book, checked out years before by a feckless student, never returned. Sophy rose, took it into her arms, stooped slightly over it, and shuffled across the room. They all burst into laughter, even Sophy, though hers was a sound of honest joy floating on the sea of derision. What the rest of them took as a joke Sophy accepted as a reprieve.

  In time her new self became familiar to them. With them, after a shower, her robe belted loosely around her, she was lovely as the dawn, but in public Sophy wore borrowed clothing, was camouflaged like a hermit crab, no longer the object of male fascination and desire.

  It was a shared secret, one that made them more than merely friends. They became a club: the Decline and Fall Club. They swore an oath to one another. Even after they left school, they would stay close to one another. They would meet every year, and each of them would find a place to stand where she could be woman as woman was meant to be, and thereafter she would never decline or fall from that place.

  SPRING: THE YEAR 2000

  IN THE BARN WHERE CAROLYN Crespin Shepherd knelt, the muted grays of hay and sheep blended indistinguishably in shadow. Outside, the field and woods glistened in a day’s-dessert of sunset, a sky like a split melon that oozed bright juice over every greening twig and unfolding leaf. Out there was a fete, a carnival, puddles from the departing thunderstorm throwing sun around like confetti, but here were more serious matters, a murmuring woolliness beneath the cob-webbed beams, the tidal smells of birthing.

  Light and shadow. Brilliance and dark. Chiaroscuro.

  The word popped out of nothing, a printed word, not an oral one, not one Carolyn could remember using. Still, there it was, stored away in her mental attic along with all the other pack-rat bits and pieces of mind-furniture: old affections, old fears, old games. Hide-and-seek in the summer dusk, shrubberies making monster-shadows amid polygons of lamplight from windows, clarity and mystery, reality and possibility, Ready or not, here I come! Well, now that the word had been dragged out, use could be made of it.

  “Chiaroscuro,” she said to the watchful young ewe who stood pressed against the rough boards of the pen. “A good name for a black-and-white lamb, Mama. First lamb of the new century and first lamb for you. We’ll call her Chiaro, for short.”

  The ewe’s amber eyes remained fixed, the oblong pupils glaring. She raised one forefoot and stamped, thrusting her body as far from Carolyn as the pen would permit. Pressed between her mother and the timbers, the lamb protested weakly. The ewe only pressed the harder as it stamped again.

  Carolyn drew a deep breath, caught suddenly between laughter and tears. The ewe was threatening her, warning her away. Sixty pounds or so of fangless, hornless sheep, incapable of any real defense, and still she stamped, still she protected, still those yellow eyes glared a primordial defiance. Behind her the lamb complained once more, a fretful baa while the mother stamped: Live or die, this lamb is mine!

  It was so uncomplicated for sheep! “All right, Mama,” Carolyn murmured. “That’s all right. I’ll look at your baby tomorrow.”

  The lamb had been licked dry, it had nursed, it had crouched to pee as female sheep and goats did and as rams and bucks did not. So much sufficed to tell Carolyn that all parts were female and functioning. No need to take this one up to the nursery box in the kitchen; no need for bottle feeding. Except for the shawl of white around the bony little shoulders, it was inky black. Chiaroscuro. A fancy name for a wee ewe-sheep.

  Clutching at the top rail of the pen, Carolyn rose, pulling herself slowly upright, waiting for bones and muscles to accept the change of position. Not as easy to get up as it had once been, not as easy to get down. Things changed. Bodies changed. People changed. Thank God for sheep, who seemed always the same. Hal had taught her to love the timelessness of them, and lately she had lost the count of years in the slow movement of sheep grazing; in the incurious but watchful gaze of yellow eyes; in this annual ritual of birth, she and Hal making a fuss over the first lamb while the ewes stared and munched, muttering among themselves, “Lambs. Lambs. Me, too.” They’d all have babies by the end of April, mostly twins: lambs to skip and race the pasture boundaries, black and gray, brown and white, playing lamb games. One could discover centuries in lamb games, so Hal said. One could discover aeons in the foolhardy and joyous, in life abundant and wasteful, running for the sake of life itself, no matter what fanged demons lurked beyond the fences.

  There would be foolhardy life itself until there was no more grass, no more room for games. A year ago there had been scant room. This year there was none. All these lambs would have to go—to someone else, or to the slaughterer. There was no more pasture here.

  She left the pen laggingly, conscious of pain in her right arm where she’d bruised it over the weekend shifting hay. At their ages neither she nor Hal should be shifting hay! Hal kept urging her to hire someone to live on the place, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. When Carlos’s family had got too big for the little house and moved away, the resultant tranquillity had been wonderful. She had heard birds she’d never heard before, seen little animals she hadn’t known lived there. Having anyone else around night and day seemed an intrusion on the quiet she treasured. Carlos came five days a week. That was enough.

  She shut the gate firmly, double-checking the latch, assuring the protection of wood and wire between the vulnerable ewes and the wild dogs that roamed the river bottom, onetime partners in the primordial covenant, betrayed and abandoned to their own history, now become creatures contemptuous of man and all his works.

  Hal had been brought
up on a farm; he believed in the covenants. The wild covenant that destroys no habitat and hunts only to live, as the wolf or the puma hunts. The farmer covenant among mankind and those he houses and feeds. Out of millennial history, each owed to each, though the animals kept their accounts better than man did. Milk and meat and wool on the animal side, food and care and a life kinder than that of the wild on man’s side. In return for a place by the fire and the leavings of the table, stalking cats owed surveillance of the granary, and horn-throated hounds paid their way with keen ears and keener noses, assuring that no traveler, of whatever intent, should approach unheralded.

  As now, from up the hill, a sudden ruckus of dogs!

  She could distinguish Fancy’s yap, Fandango’s bay, Hector’s deep roar; an annunciation, fervid but without rancor; a canine alarm signifying someone they knew. Thank heaven it was friend or relation, for she was sick to death of the strangers who’d been haunting the doorstep lately: millenarians, trumpeters of Armageddon, Bible-thumpers by the pairs and half dozens, all determined to share their message.

  Presumably tonight’s visitor knew enough about the place either to wait for her or to come looking. She moved toward the barn door, stopping momentarily to fill her pocket with rolled grain. When she went out, a dark shape materialized against the fence across the lane. She fished in the grain pocket, held the rolled oats between the wires, felt them snuffled up by soft lips that went on nibbling after the oats were gone. Hermes. A wether. Orphaned at birth, hand reared, kept as a pet, both for his lovely fleece and for his peoplish habits.

  She leaned over the fence and scratched his head between the horns, murmuring in her secret voice, sheep sheep—sheep sheep, peering across the shadowy form at the crouched blots near the watering tank. The rams: one pitchy black; one not so pitchy, the dark-coppery moorit; one light, the white one; and two intermediate shades that daylight would reveal as gray and a dark-faced tan. Five. All.

  A voice from the top of the hill: “Mom? Are you down there?”