Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  The puppet was Ganesha, the Hindu god of wisdom and learning. His long nose could sniff out any kind of trouble – Fay should take heed. Chance had done a project on India in sixth grade. She’d seen the Ganesha one time on Marion’s list of puppets, but not when they were packing up. How did Billy happen to have Marion’s puppet? For use maybe with that pagan group? Was Samantha in that?

  She went into the bathroom and discovered a contact lens solution on the shelf above the sink. Sammy’s, she supposed, so she poured the solution into the sink. She dried her hands on a wad of toilet paper and dropped it in the wastebasket. The basket was full of papers – her earring maybe? She pulled out a pile.

  Poems! Billy’s poems? They had that in common, wanting to write things down. Only the top one wasn’t in Billy’s handwriting. It was a poem someone had written to him. The only move in yoga I could do was the corpse. / Until you…. She skimmed to the end. And then you came along and with a word... Why, it was a love poem! Was Billy the you in the poem? Who was the poet?

  Someone was outside on the stairs. Billy? Didn’t want him to know she’d come here when she said she was heading home. She crumpled the poem into a pocket, squeezed out the window, down the fire escape, and jumped on her bike. Up Mill Street, down Route 125 to Flint Road.

  Sammy, she thought. Samantha. Billy and Samantha. He was lying about the woman being his half-sister, oh sure. He was just using Chance. Using her!

  One thing she knew. She wasn’t playing Beauty to his prince. Ethan could do the prince. She’d tell Billy that.

  “Chance?” Surprise. He was there! “Why’d you run off like that?”

  “Don’t bother to come to the school this afternoon. Ethan’s going to play the prince.”

  She clicked off. Careened into the home driveway, stashed her bike beside the red Vespa and ran into the house. Fay and the psychic had their heads together at the kitchen table. They stopped talking when they saw her – talking about her? She supposed she should tell about Cedric and the French teacher. But she didn’t need an inquisition at this point.

  She was feeling angry – what was wrong with her? She was home, she should be happy. “Hi,” she said, and ran upstairs before they could open their mouths. Flung herself on her bed, heard the springs clash, and flattened the wrinkled poem with the palm of her hand. Who was the writer here?

  Then what would she do? She didn’t know. Pull the woman’s hair? Go after her with a nail file? The thought was so absurd she had to laugh.

  On the other hand, maybe she would.

  * * *

  Fay’s mind wasn’t on Stormy’s vision but she supposed she’d have to listen. The performance was at three and already it was eleven-thirty. She had things to do. Time was running out. She was nervous, antsy, she’d always had Marion to direct, but now she was the director. At least she had Chance back to take over from Stormy who was all thumbs with puppets, and then Billy, who was the best of them all. He’d learned from one of his foster parents, he told her, and she thought she might contact that person as well. She could always use a back-up. She couldn’t wholly depend on Billy being there.

  “…it came to me in the middle of the rehearsal,” Stormy was saying in her high-pitched voice. “Something about the way the prince was dancing, his head lolling back, don’t you know, his hands waving in the air. The way he tried to bend her way back. Only then I got my strings tangled, darn it. And I lost the vision!”

  “So what did you see before you lost it?” The children were playing outside with Willard’s trains. Apple was making a little village near the tracks with yellow plastic houses and little plastic people.

  “A woman,” Stormy said. “The prince was dancing with a woman. That’s what I saw.” She nodded for emphasis and grinned at Fay.

  “But that’s exactly what he was doing in the play, right? He had a vision of Beauty and he was dancing?” Stormy was wasting her time. Fay wanted to go over the script again, and then write out instructions for the boy who was coming to milk the goats. Shoving her chair back, she jumped up. She couldn’t just sit here and wait for Stormy to conjure up a vision.

  “You don’t understand,” Stormy said. “They were really in love in my vision, it wasn’t just a play. They were running off into the bushes to make love in the mist. It was all around them. But then when the strings tangled…”

  “It couldn’t’ve been Beauty running into the bushes, because she was still asleep,” Fay said. Though she was interested in spite of herself. “Could you see them? What did they look like?”

  Stormy gazed up at the ceiling as if she’d find the answer there. “But that the man was tall,” she said. “And the woman… Oh! Yes, it’s coming back… The woman’s face was, well, dark.”

  Marion, Fay thought. It could have been Marion. If you believed Stormy, that is, and she had to. She was right some of the time.

  “Look closer at the man,” she told Stormy. “Was it Cedric?” Cedric was of average height, not much taller than Marion.

  “No,” Stormy said, shaking her head. “I would’ve known if it was that bugger.” She grimaced. “It was somebody tall, and that, my dear, is all I can tell you.” She smacked her hands together, then folded her arms on the platform of her chest.

  “Thank you, Stormy.” Who could it be then? Certainly not Billy himself. He was too old for Chance, but much too young for Marion. Fay pulled up a lungful of breath. And let it out again when Ethan came into the kitchen, complaining loudly.

  “Chance said I have to be the prince and I told her I can’t. I have to make the mist. I can’t do a puppet and the mist. I won’t.” He glared at Fay and folded his arms.

  “Maybe it was him, I saw,” Stormy said, pointing a finger at lanky Ethan.

  “I don’t think so,” Fay said. Chance ran down the stairs, almost stumbling in her haste.

  “I won’t do it,” Ethan told Chance. “It’s not for you to decide anyway.”

  “You have to,” Chance said. “I won’t let Billy do it.”

  “Ethan’s right for once,” Fay said. “It’s not for you to decide. I say Billy’s doing it. You can’t let personal quarrels come before the show. You have to sacrifice for – ”

  No one was listening. The back door opened and there was Billy. Everyone looked at him and he blinked. “Why’d you run off like that?” he said to Chance. “I tried to explain to Sammy…”

  “To hell with Sammy,” Chance cried. “I don’t give a damn.”

  “She’s my sister, I told you that! How many times do I have to say it? You’re so blind!” Chance was running back up the stairs. He followed her.

  “You are doing the prince,” Fay hollered after him. “We need you.”

  “I said I would and I will,” Billy yelled back.

  “See?” Ethan said, and stomped back up to his room. Fay heard his voice in the upstairs hall, shouting at Chance.

  “Good,” Fay hollered at the foot of the stairs. “We need you for the technical stuff, Ethan. Oh, and Billy – who was the foster parent who taught you to operate a puppet? It might be helpful to have someone in the wings, just in case.”

  Billy paused at the landing. He was already in black, prepared for the show, his dreads tied back with a black elastic band. He might be six-foot-two or taller.

  So what? she asked herself. So were a million other men. It was absurd to think of Billy in the same breath as Marion. And why should she believe in these so-called visions? Stormy had an overreaching imagination, that was all. She should write a novel.

  “Uh, Jane,” he said. “Jane Fingerling. She was my foster mother in Williston. I mean, years ago. Chance, open the door!” Fay heard him banging on it.

  “Fay, I’m off,” Stormy said in her right ear. “Since you don’t need me. That new client I told you about, you know?”

  “Take your cell with you,” Fay said. “In case I need you at the last minute.”

  “What about this afternoon?” Glenna said in her left ear. “What if that L
ong Braid woman shows up again. My assignment, remember?”

  Fay nodded. She’d almost forgotten that woman. Too many other candidates had pushed the Long Braid into – the mist, yes. “Talk to her then. Find out who she is, why she comes. Maybe she’s a puppeteer, too, wanting to steal our ideas.” Puppeteers crawling out of the woodwork, she thought. Out of the yellow wallpaper.

  Now she could hear three angry voices. She might lose a Beauty, a prince and a mist if she didn’t go up herself and mediate.

  “Okay, you guys,” she hollered. “I’m coming up. This fighting has to stop!”

  * * *

  Saturday afternoon it was still raining cats and dogs, as her mother used to say. They’d had to cover stage and marionettes with a tarp to get them into the school. Even so, or maybe because people couldn’t work or play outside, the school gym was filled to overflowing with kids and adults. Glenna could see them from where she stood behind the puppet theater, ready for the Act 2 vision to fade and the mist to clear. Ready for the battle to start between Nightshade and the prince. The kids would love that! They were all eyes and ears below the stage. Violence, it seemed, was all most people wanted to see these days.

  And they got their share, Glenna thought, with the Valentini women. “The Triple Murders,” the Branbury Independent was calling them. Today’s audience was here to see how the Valentini Marionettes were holding on, she supposed. When anyone asked how the troupe was doing, she’d just say “holding. We’re all holding.”

  Though holding on to what, she didn’t know. For herself at eighty-four it was holding on to a nightly statin and a baby aspirin, she guessed, prescribed by her woman doctor. The old life force was still pumping away in her ears. “Take a deep breath,” the life force told her. “Keep on breathing, kid.”

  “You’re on,” Fay whispered in her ear and Glenna saw that the mist had cleared. Willard had moved the ancient castle into the foreground. She dropped Nightshade down onto the stage in front of the castle door.

  Glenna watched the show from the wings. She couldn’t help but shiver when Nightshade pulled a glittery knife from her skirts and held it to the prince’s throat. Or giggle when a child cried out, “Don’t hurt him, no!” At the end, though, when the prince forced the witch into submission and entered the castle door to see Sleeping Beauty as lovely as ever, she swore she heard Billy whisper “Marion.”

  Of course she’d misheard him, she thought afterward when the crowd had done cheering and the kids were rushing backstage, wanting to examine marionettes, castle and bed where Beauty had newly wakened. Why, anyway, would he say that name? He’d more likely said “amazing,” or “marvelous.” Fact was, Glenna’s hearing was worsening. Eyes, ears, knees, legs – they all failed, along with the brain. Only memories of her early childhood, it seemed, stayed intact. Glenna in dungarees and blue shirt, milking her first cow. Her brown hair in a long braid like the woman who was rising from her seat in the back row. Uh oh. Woman with a long gray-black braid? Something about that woman she had to…

  Her assignment, yes! She pushed through the crowd before the woman could escape. “Refreshments,” she half shouted at Long Braid. “Over there in the corner. Help yourself. It’s pure Kool-Aid but it’s liquid. Homemade brownies, if you’re lucky.”

  “Thank you,” the woman said, shaking her head, which probably meant no, although Glenna did need her glasses changed. But she couldn’t let the woman go, could she? If so, she’d be the homely little girl again, kept after school for passing notes and not completing her arithmetic.

  “Who are you?” Glenna got right to the point. “My cousin wants to know.” She jerked her thumb at Fay. “She owns the troupe. I mean, since the other one died, um, Valentini.”

  “Marion,” the Long Braid said, so softly it was a whisper. That name again. Glenna squinted, and moved closer. She could see that the woman’s skin was darker than her own white skin. A light brown, the nostrils slightly flared, the lips full like Marion’s. Glenna’s mind clicked. Her brain wasn’t dead yet. She could put two and two together and still get four.

  This was Marion’s birth mother, her brain said. That’s why the woman kept coming to the performances. To see her daughter. The one she gave away years ago. “But she’s gone now, your Marion,” Glenna said. “So why – ?”

  The woman wasn’t going to say why. She was shouldering her bag, snatching up the program that read VALENT1NI MARIONETTES PRESENT on the front cover. “Wait,” Glenna said as the woman started for the gymnasium door. “You have to meet Fay. She’ll want to…”

  The woman was on the run. Jostled by a child, her program flew out of her hand as she hurried through the door. Already Fay was hustling over, concerned: “Why’d you let her go? Who was she anyway?” Softening her voice, she said, “Glenna, love, it was your assignment to talk to her.”

  “I did,” Glenna said. “It was Marion’s mother. Or an aunt. You can bet on it.”

  “Whoa!” Fay cried. “She might’ve been able to tell us something! Something we could follow through. If I’d realized, I could’ve followed her out to the parking lot. Got a license plate number or something.”

  “She didn’t have a car,” Glenna said. “She had a broomstick. She flew. Flew right up and over the school.”

  Now Fay was laughing, in spite of herself, laughing away the broomstick. “I give up on you, Glenna, you’re a nut. You’re a screaming looney. You’re a lousy sleuth.”

  “I’m your old cousin,” Glenna reminded her with a grin. “We came out of the same gene pool. Anyway, I got her program, it dropped on the floor. Something handwritten on it.”

  “Good for you.” Fay scooped it up. “‘Hogwash’,” she read aloud. “‘Play’s ending not my M’s style.’ Oh, dear,” said Fay, who’d gone back to the kiss-and-be-happy-ever-after ending for the sake of the schoolchildren, she’d said. Dullsville, Glenna thought. Pure sentiment.

  “And look!” Fay was excited. She pointed to the printed names of the characters. The woman had practically scratched a hole with her pen where the word Prince Floribund should be. “What does that mean? What was the Long Braid wearing, Glenna? Do you recall? I didn’t get a close look.”

  Now Glenna was on the spot. “Um, something blue, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Blue, yes, dammit! A blue skirt. Black raincoat. See? There it is. She forgot the coat. In a hurry to get away from me.”

  Fay snatched up the coat and looked at the label. LL Bean. “A big help. Oh dear. Everybody’s got an LL Bean.”

  “Look in the pockets?” Glenna suggested.

  “Congratulations. We all loved it!” The school principal was tapping Fay’s shoulder, a huge smile on her face. Fay smiled back.

  “You look,” Fay told Glenna. “It’s your assignment.” She turned to receive her accolades. In Glenna’s opinion, Fay had never really left the stage.

  Glenna searched the pockets and came up with a pen, comb, a small folder of tissues, a handful of damp wrinkled ones, cough drops, a scrap of paper with a list of things to do on it, a half-eaten tangerine, and a bottle of pills. She stuck the list in her own bag and threw the coat over an arm. She’d think of something to do with it.

  Ha, she’d take it to The Round Robin, that’s what she’d do. Why had Round Robin come into her head? Round Robin, she said to herself. Round… Oh yes! “Blouse. Too long in the arms,” Long Braid had scribbled on the to-do list: “Return to Round Robin.”

  The Round Robin was a thrift shop in Branbury whose proceeds went to the local hospital. If Long Braid shopped there often, Glenna bet, they’d know who she was. There were few African-Americans in Branbury, Vermont. Too bad, it was boring to look at a pool of white faces all the time, but that’s the way it was. Too cold up here maybe – long winters. Though Glenna rather liked those winters. Life slowed.

  Back by the marionette stage a boy was trying to make the witch dance in front of an admiring little girl. Glenna didn’t like that. She’d begun to identify
with that witch. “We don’t want to mess up the strings, do we?” she cackled in Nightshade’s voice.

  She didn’t scare the kid. He just smirked. “A cool puppet,” he said.

  Glenna smiled. She took the compliment personally.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Pandora’s Box Explodes

  Sunday, October 7

  The first thing Fay did after milking Sunday morning was to sit down at the kitchen table and begin to rewrite the ending for next week’s Rutland audience – mostly adults this time. They’d want something more than a boy-girl kiss. But what? She didn’t care for Marion’s ending either: the prince kissing Beauty and finding a dry, wrinkled rose – it was too awful. And she couldn’t have a female prince kissing Beauty yet still use Billy; he was so good she wanted him in the troupe. Even if he and Chance were still at odds. Chance remained suspicious of Sammy even though she seemed a perfectly nice, hardworking person who was probably exactly what Billy said she was: his half-sister. And once a foster kid herself – Chance should relate to that. “You’ll just have to go to the family care office and see for yourself,” she called to Chance, who was coming down for a late breakfast, yawning.

  “Huh?” Chance headed for the pantry, a dog and cat in her wake, hoping for a handout. Fay had already fed them, of course. They all left the care and feeding of human and animal mouths for Fay.

  “I’m talking about that Sammy woman,” Fay said. “They can put your fears to rest. Try to find out from Billy where that Fingerling woman lives, the one who taught him to operate marionettes, would you?”

  “Now you’re suspicious,” Chance said, pouring kibbles into the animal dishes, which meant they got a double breakfast, but oh well. “You just want to check up on Billy.”