Sister Wolf

by Ann Arensberg

  “Don’t you fret. Old Gabriel is completely immune to the peach bloom. They’re doing remedial reading. She seems to be a little slow.”

  “He’s not touching her anymore, is he?”

  “Well, she keeps covering her face with her hands, and then he slaps her hands back on the page. I’d teach her not to be so stubborn with me.”

  Marit began to beat the ground with her hands and feet. “You’re trying to hurt me. If you want her, he must want her too!”

  “You watch your temper. At least you’ll never see me making myself sick with jealousy over one puny human.”

  Marit sat up straight. It seemed to her that she was hearing something important.

  “Jealous? Is that what I am?”

  Lola looked back at her sharply. Marit sat there, frowning and slack-jawed. Under the force of revelation, she seemed more slow-witted than enlightened.

  “I’d like to know what else,” said Lola. “You came unhinged.”

  “I’ve been jealous,” Marit started to argue. “I was jealous of Marcy Gammons at school, when she got editor of the magazine. But I didn’t feel as if my ribs had been crushed.”

  “You have the emotional vocabulary of a five-year-old. That was envy.”

  “Marit.” Lola wiped her hands, which were tacky with pitch. “I love you and you can damn well listen to me.” She stood in front of Marit and towered over her; she would not condescend to hunker down and plead.

  “You had me good and frightened. You know how it is when you are very sick? You belong to the germ. Jealousy took you right over, honey; it ate you up. Your pretty face changed; your body changed too. You looked like someone with terminal arthritis, all pinched and bent.”

  “I don’t work right. I’m ugly inside. Is that what you mean?”

  Marit cried black tears down her cheeks. Lola kneeled down beside her.

  “I wish I had a mirror. I’d give you a shock that would last you the rest of your life.”

  They heard voices, one low-pitched and one high, from behind the yews. Both girls froze in place until the voices veered away. Gabriel and his student were walking up the slope. Marit could see his falcon’s profile, and the tendrils of hair at the back of his neck, which were feathery from sweat and from the breeze that had started to blow. She could make out the line of his hips and his large workman’s hands. Watching him before, through the gap in the yew trees, his perfections had hurt her, like thorns rammed into her forehead and spears jabbed into her heart. She had no spunk left now for hurting or for admiring. The man who was walking up the hill was very short. The short man climbing the slope looked like a boy.

  It was time to go home and change back into trousers. She had traps to repair, the kind of trap that encloses and does not wound the animal. When the traps were fixed, she was going to bait them with nuts. There were cases of rabies in the county and squirrels were carriers. Marit would take some trapped squirrels to the zoo, where they could be tested.

  She reached out her hands and Lola pulled her to her feet. They did not have to go back to the car by way of the fair. There was a path through the woods behind the tennis courts that led to the field which was being used as a parking lot. Marit held herself unsteadily at first, like a vase with a hairline crack in it. She leaned on Lola’s arm until they had crossed the courts.

  When they found the car, Marit got into the driver’s seat. She liked to drive with bare feet, so she handed her shoes to Lola. She drove over the bumpy field and waved to the guard at the entrance as she turned down the road. She felt well enough now to engage in a little mischief. When her nerve was intact, she drove like a teenage boy, left elbow clamped down on the door and fingers playing lightly on the steering wheel. Her right arm was stretched out on the seat back. She pinched Lola’s shoulder.

  “Don’t tweak me,” said Lola, “hold the wheel. You’re driving by remote control.”

  “I can drive with my knee,” answered Marit. “You want me to show you?”

  Lola made an Italian gesture and collapsed against the seat.

  “Why can’t you be a moderate person? Why can’t you be placid? You’re always on the edge of this or the verge of that. Oh, the peace of a partial lobotomy! One tiny nick in the frontal lobe. Think how quiet and useful you could be.”

  Marit had no choice but to steer with both hands, she was laughing so hard. Up ahead was the East Niles common, and a yellow blinker.

  Marit slowed down and looked over at Lola, whose eyes were closed.

  “You’ve never had an attack,” she said, “like me, today.”

  Lola roused herself.

  “I’ve been angry enough to hit out, but I’ve never gone under. Anger kills my feelings. If my girl wants somebody else, there must be something wrong with her. Nothing wrong with me, that’s for sure. I’m the best there is.”

  Between East Niles and Niles there was heavy late-afternoon traffic, people coming home from work and chartered buses bringing vacationers from the city. Marit was restless in traffic, and apt to grow unruly, passing cars in no-passing zones and tailgating white-haired drivers. Lola watched her to see if she was about to break any rules. For once, she seemed to be content with the enforced slow pace. She was frowning, but the frown was thoughtful, not impatient.

  “Luba said that men have more glands than women.” Marit spoke without taking her eyes away from the road. “She told me that women want men to admire them, but men need to have a woman for their health. If they stay with one woman, they get thin and lose their hair. Like Vlado, I suppose she meant.”

  “What does that make me?” asked Lola. “I like to stick to one girl at a time.”

  “She said that expecting a man to be faithful was like expecting a pig to smell sweet. They want a woman without seeing her face, if she has on a tight skirt or high heels. She said the first thing they do is undress you in their minds.”

  “Will you kindly stop saying ‘she said’? I thought you told me that Luba liked to make up stories to scare you.”

  “Just horror stories at bedtime, but she knew about men. She had a lover.”

  “You kept that one a secret. Who was he?”

  “The French consul or the Swedish chargé. I imagine both.”

  Lola wished that Marit would look at her instead of staring ahead. She did not want this conversation to get too earnest.

  “I’d say that Luba had the extra glands, and she fed you that old-country moonshine to keep you off her tail. Better to have you blame the whole male sex than your poor wronged mother.”

  They were out of Niles and on the open road. The faster she drove, the livelier Marit looked. She turned to Lola with an impish expression on her face.

  “Do you think that Gabriel has extra glands?”

  “I hope so. You sure won’t have any fun if he has too few.”

  The approach to the Deym estate was banked with mock orange. Marit breathed in their scent, which was sweeter on still, warm days. She turned in to the circular driveway and stopped the motor.

  “I guess I’m staying for supper,” said Lola. “It’s not shredded wheat again, is it?”

  “Mrs. Mayo was here this afternoon. She said that she’d leave shepherd’s pie.”

  “I love a nursery supper. Can we make some pink junket, too?”

  “Stay off food just a second,” begged Marit. “I need you to listen to me. I want Gabriel. I want it to be perfect. What if it doesn’t work?”

  Lola patted her cheek and started to open the door. “Love is an appetizer, honey; it’s not supposed to be the whole meal. It’s the zest to life, you catch? It’s not life itself.”

  Marit gave up. She pushed down the door handle on her side. If she wanted Lola’s attention, she would have to feed her.

  FIVE

  A NATIVE OF NILES, MASSACHUSETTS, would describe himself as living “in town,” and any summer resident as living “on the hill.” There was no town unless you counted the general store, the post office, and Rippey’s Yar
d Goods, and the two and a half new bungalows in the field behind them, set down by a builder who ran out of funds before the third house was finished. There was no hill, either, at least not in the feudal sense, no high ground occupied by the overlord who could see his enemies coming better from a height. The whole landscape around Niles was hilly, and the hills rose up and dipped down without regard for the wealth or ancestry of any householder. The terrain was democratic, if the natives were not.

  Vladimir and Luba Deym had lived “on the hill” for twenty-five years. They were considered hill dwellers even during the last years before their deaths, when they had closed up the New York apartment, canceled their standing Easter reservation at the Paris Ritz, and moved to Niles for the sake of Vlado’s lungs. The Berkshires are damp and rainy, but he breathed better there than he did in the bad city air.

  The distance between the townspeople and the summer colony was congenial to Vlado. He did not like much society of any kind. He preferred to stay in the attic with his inventions, the automatic cigarette smoker, the dog-tick plucker, and the can of shaving cream that produced hot lather years before its time. It was not clear whether or not Vlado wanted his inventions to work. He had drawn plans for the shaving-cream can down to the last detail, recorded the results of many successful tests, and then stuffed the records and the spidery drawings into a dress box. He spent years, by contrast, building the cigarette smoker, which stood by itself in one of the attic cells. It looked like a whimsical piece of motorized sculpture, and ran intermittently, but never for more than an hour. Vlado’s most successful invention, the Bishop liked to remark, was prolonging his time alone in the attic.

  It made Luba petulant to be consigned to the hill by the townspeople. She complained of it, remembering Hungary: “We had so kind a relation with our peasants.” Luba watched the summer colonists at the post office making up to the postmistress, Anna Weebs, asking her advice about carpenters or yard boys, getting her to top the weather report with an even gloomier prediction. These conversations seemed stagy and impersonal to Luba, who preferred to gossip. With the natural impertinence of the aristocrat, she questioned Mrs. Weebs about her daughter’s acne, and lectured her on the abuse of sugar in the American diet. When next she went to Manhattan, she brought back a bottle of astringent solution from her Hungarian faceman, and presented it to Mrs. Weebs for young Roseanne. “We Hungarians have an ancient knowledge of the complexion,” Luba explained; “send her to me, I will release the pores.” Anna Weebs was used to the aloof cajolery of the hill dwellers; she had no defense against Luba’s imperious brand of friendliness. Rosie Weebs spent many hours on the chaise longue in Luba’s bedroom, waiting for a green paste of herbs to do its work. The spots on her face dimmed down from red to pink, and Luba gave her a pair of white cotton gloves to wear to bed, so that she would not pick her face while she was sleeping.

  Luba embraced village life that one and only summer. The embrace was strenuous, and smothered any resistance. She spread her arms wide and took East Niles, as well as Niles, to her bosom. Only the faintest demurrals could be heard, but not by Luba. No sound came out of Mr. Hinning’s mouth when he opened the side door of his Unitarian church, ready to lock up for the day, and found Luba and a crew of nurserymen on their hands and knees, pressing down bark chips around a dozen rosebushes they had planted in a double semicircle facing the door. Fratelli’s truck was parked in front of the church, and Mr. Hinning saw two men unloading a wrought-iron bench that had been painted white. At this point he began to agitate his hand in the air. Luba saw the gesture and read it as a salute. “There you are, Vicar, you will be so pleased! We are putting a meditation garden.” Mr. Hinning backed up the steps and stumbled inside the church building. It is likely that he slammed the door behind him.

  After this, Luba’s village summer moved into high gear. Besides a gift of the German classics, untranslated, to the one-room library, her legacy to Niles was the redecoration of the old Grange Hall, in disuse since local farmers were now in the resort business. The Grange would become the center for town sociables, and Luba herself, with her dimpled knuckles, would wield the gavel at Tuesday Great Books, at the Seeders and Weeders on Thursday afternoons, and at the Birdwalkers, which met on no schedule, but often and quarrelsomely.

  Out went the backless wooden benches, and in their place were installed a vanload of Windsor chairs, tied up with quilted cushions in a green-and-white bamboo print. “Can’t we stop it? She’ll quilt the walls!” muttered Mrs. Rippey, whose yard-goods store had not been patronized. The walls were safe, but the century-old rafters were not. Luba wanted to paint them green, with white mottoes on them, to carry out the color scheme of the cushions. Now the local muttering turned into mutiny. A squadron of clubwomen, led by Sarah Rippey, barred the doors to the painters, who made a hasty retreat with their tarps and ladders.

  Luba’s revenge on the purists was transcendent. Ferreting through the area, she grabbed up a motley huge battery of Colonial kitchen equipment—keelers and cheese presses, pestles without mortars, slices and churns, posnets, skellets and toasting forks—and hung them all, out of reach, on Early American nails. Having turned the Grange into a nightmare historical society, she took an early-morning train to Saratoga Springs, where mineral baths and deep massage drained the mischief out of her.

  By the afternoon of the first Animal Airlift fund-raising coffee, the bamboo print had faded to a nameless zigzag, and the Americana had been donated, on Marit’s orders, to the Dangerfield museum. Thirty or forty people sat in the Windsor chairs, which had been drawn up close to the stage in uneven rows, listening to the speaker, whose voice carried so well that most of the audience edged its chairs backward when he started to talk.

  “… to preserve wild animals that have strayed into the asphalt jungles of Pittsfield and Albany, forced to subsist on rotting garbage, murdered by delinquents and speeding cars. …”

  George Schulte, helicopter pilot, stretched out his arms with an evangelical flourish, long arms that spanned a row of boxes behind which he stood as he delivered the opening pitch.

  “… raccoons, opossums, foxes, squirrels, owls, hawks, and nonpoisonous snakes,” he continued, slapping the top of each box in turn, causing a scrambling or a yawping inside, except where the blue racer lay coiled.

  “… humanely trapped and flown by my team to the woody recesses of the Tri-State National Forest and the Deym Sanctuary …”

  Marit stood in the back of the hall, next to the curtain hung for voters in town-council elections. Stewart Odell, who taught chemistry at the high school, was pulling at the sleeve of her jacket and talking in an audible whisper. He was urging that the Airlift be given an acronym, which could not be AA, and just as certainly not BAA (Berkshire Animal Airlift). Stewart pressed up too close to people when he spoke to them. Marit could see the thinning hair behind his ears, and the red marks left by his glasses; it made her want to pound lumps on him.

  “You spray when you talk,” said Marit, backing away. “Perhaps your bite needs adjusting. You must ask your dentist.”

  George Schulte produced a toy model of a helicopter, convinced that the rustics in the audience had never seen one, and waved it over the boxes, whirling the propeller with one finger to illustrate his points. George talked like a press release, or a brochure. Marit tried to remember who had suggested that he be the principal speaker.

  Several whispering duos had formed by the partial shelter of the homemade election booth. Eleanor Stoeber was head-to-head with Sarah Rippey. Apparently, Eleanor had missed an episode of A Silver Lining.

  “… it showed up on the brain scan. Dr. Mac wants to do more tests before he tells Andrea.”

  “No,” breathed Eleanor. “She has a concert tour ahead of her!”

  Marit caught Lola’s voice, and then she heard Horty Wake’s. She leaned in to pick up the thread.

  “… the only girl I’ve ever met who made a profit on her abortion.”

  “How could she?” aske
d Horty.

  “Very simple,” said Lola severely. “She collected five hundred dollars from all four of them.”

  In the front row across the aisle sat Moira Raymer, who wrote the social notes for the Dangerfield Beacon. Marit recognized her felt beret and the shell-studded glasses on a chain around her neck. A pad lay open on her lap, but she was not writing notes on the Airlift. She was counting the money in her wallet, spreading the bills out in fan formation, like a hand of cards.

  Marit had asked the Beacon to send their nature writer—anyone but Moira, who was campaigning in print to get the Deym preserve opened to the public, on the model of Mott’s Jungle Joyride in Oneco, New Hampshire. Marit had paid one visit to Mott’s, where the tourists were driven around in zebra-striped vans and warned, if they valued their lives, not to roll down the windows. Most of them paid no attention, so the driver was forced to brake for a party of apes, who were fighting in the middle of the road over a bag of popcorn. These same apes later climbed on the van, waving empty bottles, and beat a tattoo on the roof while the women and children shrieked. The apes were thin, the lion was shedding, and the hyena was covered with scales. Marit had wanted to feed the Motts and Moira to those wretched animals; red meat would soon correct the symptoms of malnutrition.

  Marit moved a few steps forward. She was trying to calculate the attention span of the rest of the seated audience. It was not much greater. Every person she saw was knitting, shifting, groping in a handbag, or working on his cuticles. The Airlift committee members, sitting in the second row, were passing wrapped candies back and forth. George Schulte was writing the Airlift budget on an easel blackboard.

  Then she felt the itch. The spackle of red pinpricks on the insides of her wrists was not caused by her rough linen sleeves. Marit was literally allergic to fools. The Animal Airlift had been her idea; it was out of her hands now. She was democrat enough to know that work gets done when the workers make it their own, but the autocrat in her chafed at the wrists. The Airlift had turned into a living village satire, and she was playing a stock-in-trade character, the Patroness.