by PAMELA DEAN
She received blank looks from her sisters and a rather sharp remark from her father, to the effect that he might be very like Mr. Bennet but she should thank her lucky stars that Mother was nothing like Mr. Bennet’s wife,
“What’s Mr. Bennet’s wife like?” inquired Rosemary.
“She has nerves,” said Gentian, “and she’s not very smart.”
“Oh, like Rosie,” said Juniper.
“Just because I’m sensitive,” said Rosie, hotly.
“I am sensitive,” intoned Gentian, reminded irresistibly of her Latin class, “you are nervy, she’s nutty as a fruitcake.”
Her mother cast up her eyes. Her father laughed.
“Behold the linguist,” he said.
Rosemary laughed suddenly, having figured out that Gentian was probably making as much fun of Juniper as of anybody else.
“But don’t you think it’s weird they never go out?” said Juniper.
Her mother said dryly, “I go to work, your father holes up in his study most of the day, you girls go to school. They could cavort around the yard from ten to two every day and nobody would notice a thing.”
“But they didn’t put their recyclables out or anything.”
“Vampires don’t have recyclables,” said Rosemary.
“They could read the newspaper,” said Gentian.
“They don’t get the newspaper,” said Juniper. “I asked Marie and she said they don’t subscribe.”
“Unlike Mr. Bennet,” said their father, almost as dryly as their mother, “I don’t need to get my daughters off my hands by any means available. If you’d pay half as much attention to your social studies class, Junie, as you do to the neighbors, I wouldn’t have to go talk to Mrs. Gruber on Monday.”
Gentian got up quietly and went through the dining room and the butler’s pantry and into the kitchen. The repeated mention of neighbors had reminded her of something. The green tomatoes she had snatched from her vines the day before the bulldozer smashed all the gardens were sitting in a paper sack in the bottom of the refrigerator, fat and bright red and, if the truth be told, a bit past their prime. She had a standing agreement with the Zimmermans that she would give them tomatoes and they would give her potatoes. Mrs. Zimmerman, who seemed to think gardening was vastly amusing, called it the Nightshade Treaty.
She went out the back way. It was dark already, and chilly. The stars stared at her like a host of censorious daisies. She walked through the soaking grass along the side of their house, rather than jumping the new retaining wall to land on the new driveway. She passed through the square of light from the stairway window, and heard her mother’s reading-aloud voice. They had turned back to Pride and Prejudice. Gentian looked at the new house. It was altogether dark. Even the glass of its mean windows reflected no lamplight from her own house, no starlight from anywhere.
Ordinarily, she would have walked to the center of the vacant lot and located particular stars. She went on down the driveway and right into the middle of the street, where she tilted her head back and found Aldebaran, Capella, and the Pleiades. She used averted vision to look at the Pleiades, directing her gaze off to the east of them, but keeping her attention on them directly, which meant that the parts of her eye that were better at gathering dim light were trained on them. It was one step further from watching something out of the corner of your eye. She had had a lot of practice at this technique before she became an astronomer or knew it had a name. She had used it to observe Juniper while appearing to ignore her. Nobody ever recommended using averted vision on so easily visible an object as the Pleiades or one’s sister, but she liked doing it. She thought the Pleiades deserved the attention. Juniper did not deserve it, but as a dangerous older sister, had compelled it.
The Pleiades were called the Seven Sisters. Gentian supposed bright Alcyone would be the dangerous older one. To Gentian’s direct vision, only six of the sisters were visible; but with averted vision, on a good clear moonless night, the dimmer Pleione and Celaeno and sometimes even Asterope would creep out against the black night. She let them do this, grinning briefly at the thought that she and her sisters could have had even more awful names than they did, and thought about her work for the month.
In October this year, Venus would follow the sun down so closely that you could almost never find it. Mars and Jupiter would linger longer, sharing the same part of the sky but not coming too close, like cats who only stay together in the kitchen because the food is there. Next week the waxing moon would rise in the evenings with Saturn, grow round, and pass above it from the stars of Pisces into those of Aquarius. Saturn blazed in the southern sky every night. Beginning on the eleventh of the month, Mercury, so rare and elusive, would creep above the horizon an hour before sunrise, higher and higher each day. Between it and Saturn, Gentian would have trouble finding time to do her homework.
She had a lot of homework this year. She and her best friend Becky had remarked to one another just today that school got socially easier and intellectually harder as one grew older. This year was all right, socially. She and Becky and the rest of the Giant Ants had all been friends since the third grade, when Steph joined them. Becky and Gentian had known each other since nursery school, Alma had arrived in kindergarten, and Erin had come along in second grade. This year, finally, nobody had any classes from the teacher who picked on Erin, or the one who thought Claudius was the good guy in Hamlet, or the one who expected Gentian to be just like Juniper.
Gentian’s neck was getting sore. She looked at the new house again.
It was the same from the front, as dark as dark could be, taking the light from her house’s porch, and from the streetlight, and not giving it back. She went up the Zimmermans’ driveway to the Zimmermans’ back door, and the other side of the new house was just the same. Gentian banged the knocker. The knocker made a different noise now that there was a new house here. The strong white light from the fixture over the Zimmerman’s back door, which had once stretched almost to Rosie’s flower garden, stopped at the edge of the Zimmermans’ lawn. The new house must be casting that black shadow.
Mr. Zimmerman answered the door after about a minute. He had a cadaverous face, a large belly, and a lot of gray hair. The Zimmermans’ two white cats peered around his legs.
“Hi,” said Gentian. “I brought your tomatoes. I’m sorry they’re late.”
“Hello, Genny,” said Mr. Zimmerman, who was punctilious, Gentian’s mother said, to a fault. “How nice to see you. Come in and say hello to Razzy and have some tea, and I’ll find you some potatoes.”
Mrs. Zimmerman’s name was Rosemary Ann, but there wasn’t much confusion with Gentian’s baby sister, because most people called Mrs. Zimmerman Annie, and her husband called her by that peculiar nickname made up from her initials, Gentian would have hated it, but Mrs. Zimmerman had never said anything about it. Gentian came in, laid the string bag of tomatoes down gently on the kitchen table, and petted the nearest cat.
“I wasn’t sure you’d have any,” she said, “on account of the gardens getting plowed up.”
“We didn’t think you’d have any tomatoes,” said Mr. Zimmerman. “Sit down, do please.” He went to the head of the stairs and called, “Razzy! Gentian’s here!”
“I picked all the green ones,” said Gentian. “But they should be okay. These all had yellow bits already. Dad made the really green ones into relish.”
“I’m surprised you even had any green ones,” said Mr. Zimmerman, filling the big red kettle with water and plunking it down on the burner. “They started in on that house so early.”
“Not till the first day of school,” said Gentian, with a slight sinking sensation.
Mrs. Zimmerman came into the kitchen. Like her husband, she was tall and had a lot of gray hair. She, however, had a round face and a small belly.
“Oh, good,” she said, taking the tomatoes out of the string bag and admiring them one by one. “Snatched from the jaws of destruction.”
“Did yo
u get any potatoes?” said Gentian.
“Well, they were all new ones, but we'll just think of it as an unearned luxury. I’ve got your bag all ready; I just haven't gotten around to bringing it over.”
“It's that house,” said Gentian. “It's in the way.”
“That's true,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, sitting down across the table from her. “And it went up too fast. There wasn't any time to get used to it.”
“I didn't think it was fair,” said Gentian cautiously, “that they started it the same day we went back to school.”
“Yes, that must have made the whole process seem even faster, because you weren't home all day to watch it.”
“They started it long before the first day of school,” said Mr. Zimmerman, spooning tea into the blue pot. “July sometime.”
Gentian looked at Mrs. Zimmerman, who shook her head.
On a foggy Sunday afternoon a week or so later, the vampire grandmother came to the back door and asked to borrow a snake. Rosemary, who answered the bell, was thrown into utter confusion by this request. Gentian, doing her homework at the kitchen table because they were reading Poe's stories and these scared her too silly to sit up in the attic by herself, looked up and saw a thin, gray-looking woman in blue clothes, squinting at the bewildered Rosemary.
“Is your drain clogged up?” said Gentian.
“I thought you used a fish for drains,” said Rosemary.
“No, dummy, that's for electrical work. Ask her in, Rosie.” Rosemary, still looking bewildered, moved aside, and the woman came in, blinking in the fluorescent light as if she didn't much care for it. “I’m Mrs. Hardy,” she said. “We moved in next door.” She made this sound like a daring and unusual exploit.
“I’m Genny,” said Gentian. She was embarrassed. She felt they had been inhospitable not to have visited the newcomers by now. “This is Rosemary. Give her some coffee, Rosie, and I’ll get Mom.”
Mom, when gotten, managed to persuade Mrs. Hardy to sit down and drink her coffee, which was more than the dithering Rosemary had done. Rosemary’s eyes were enormous. She had probably been remembering that vampires didn’t eat or drink. Mrs. Hardy did drink her coffee, and swallow it, though she refused the spice cookies Juniper had made.
Gentian and Rosemary sat very quiet, eating the cookies themselves, while the two women talked about the neighborhood and the dreadfulness of drains and the worse dreadfulness of plumbers. Gentian noticed, with a feeling half of regret and half of relief, that Mrs. Hardy’s fingers were of the usual length with regard to one another, and that her canine teeth were no more pointed than anybody else’s. They didn’t shine, either: she probably needed to go to the dentist.
Gentian thought her mother and Mrs. Hardy were so unalike that they might as well belong to different species. Mrs. Hardy was of an undistinguished height, and so thin she seemed almost like something made out of plywood. Gentian’s mother was tall, taller than her father, but round; her forehead and cheeks and chin, her forearms and hips and waist, were all round. Mrs. Hardy was nondescript; you couldn’t remember what color her hair or eyes were once you had looked away from her. Gentian’s mother was vivid: she had rich brown hair with a lot of red in it, and startlingly green eyes, and a lot of pink in her skin. Mrs. Hardy’s manner was dull. Her mother was not effusive, but her dryness had a definition about it.
The two of them had begun to talk about their families. Mr. Hardy was, it appeared, hopeless with plumbing, though he dealt well with furnaces and wood stoves and barbecue grills.
“What about your son?” said Gentian’s mother.
Mrs. Hardy looked startled, and then began to laugh weakly.
“Him? Oh, no,” she said. She seemed to realize that this response lacked something, and added, looking at Gentian with her nondescript eyes, “I think he’s about your age.”
“He’s tall for fourteen,” said Gentian’s mother.
“I’m wrong, then,” said Mrs. Hardy, as if she were used to it. “He’s fifteen.”
“He’s tall for that, too,” said Gentian. “Tell him to watch out for my big sister.”
Mrs. Hardy looked dubiously at Rosemary, who was trying not to laugh; and Gentian’s mother changed the subject. Mrs. Hardy left after another five minutes. Gentian cleared away her coffee cup and examined it. No, she had really drunk that coffee.
“Why didn’t you tell her her son could come over and meet us?” said Gentian to her mother.
“Because if I had, Juniper would have explained to me that having his mother tell him it was okay was the very best way of making him never come near any of you girls. And then she would say I had done it on purpose.”
“Do I have to be like that when I’m sixteen?”
Her mother put the cups and saucers in the dishwasher, laughing. “I don’t think there’s a law that says you have to,” she said. “Statistics, however, are very much against you.” She leaned against the cabinet and pushed her hair out of her eyes. From the other side,” she went on thoughtfully, “it feels very different.”
“But I don’t want people discussing me in the kitchen.”
“I’ll remind you of that on your sixteenth birthday,” said her mother.
She went off to root her husband out of his study and make him come for a walk, a process Gentian had admired so many times that she no longer needed to witness it to be amused. Juniper was over at her friend Sarah’s house watching all Sarah s brother’s tapes of “Red Dwarf,” and Rosie was with her Girl Scout troop being shown the wonders of Lock and Dam Number One on the Mississippi. When the door had closed behind her parents and she had watched them to the end of the block, Gentian went up to the second floor and into Junie’s room.
Junie had the room at the head of the stairs. It wasn’t very large, but Gentian coveted it intensely because there was a sun-porch attached to it and she had, since she was about six, wanted it herself for a library. Junie had painted it pale lavender and made lavender-and-green-striped cushions for the two old wicker chairs they had found there when they moved into the house. She had announced plans to paint the chairs too, as well as a long wicker table found in the garage; then she was going to make a rag rug for the floor and have her friends in to tea. The Portmeirion teapot and cups she had gotten for her birthday three years ago sat on the grimy gray table. In the corners were piles of clothes Junie hadn’t gotten around to mending, baskets of rags for the rug, their mother’s old sewing machine, stacks of old magazines Junie hadn’t cut recipes out of yet, and a towering, precarious pile of yellowed newspapers. Junie had planned to make a scrapbook out of articles about the explosion of the space shuttle, but she hadn’t cut those articles out yet either.
The wasteful use Junie made of this room filled Gentian with a combination of scorn and envy that almost made her feel sick. It was idiotic of her. She was obviously destined for the attic room, because it contained the dome the Victorian builder had put in for his telescope. Juniper’s room was hopeless for astronomy. But Gentian coveted it just the same.
She unzipped the striped cover of the back cushion on the right-hand chair and pulled out Junie’s diary, a fat blue leather book stamped with silver roses. Junie had been keeping it for two years, and had almost come to the end of it, although she wrote very small and sometimes skipped a week at a time.
Gentian sat down in the other chair and flipped through the diary backwards. She didn’t manage to come up here very often in the summer, and the weather had been so good for stargazing that she had missed her usual mammoth catch-up session in September.
It was only during the summer that Junie was forced to admit in her diary that she had a family. During the school year she filled it up with accounts of lunch-table conversations and chance encounters with boys in the hallways and the long conversations she and Sarah had on Friday nights when they slept over with one another. The way Junie recorded these conversations drove Gentian to distraction. Junie would remember stuff about whether Sarah thought Denny liked her, and
would write every last line down; but if they had an interesting discussion, like what Sarah thought about having sex, or whether this or that book was any good, Junie would just note it briefly.
Gentian found the beginning of summer vacation, marked with a double line of stickers in the shape of roses, and began to read. Her sister had spent several pages bemoaning the fact that she wouldn’t see Denny all summer and had only one class with him next year. That took care of the month of June. She spent most of July writing poetry that didn’t rhyme and was full of ellipses. Gentian skipped over that. She knew that Becky’s poetry was much better.
In August Juniper became hugely excited about something she talked about in such cryptic terms that Gentian was mystified. It had to do with running into Denny in the library one weekend and finding out that Sarah had a crush on Denny too, but exactly how Juniper had determined this was uncertain. Juniper wrote a lot of poetry about it, but it wasn’t very coherent.
In September Juniper rhapsodized about the Creative Writing class she (and Sarah) shared with Denny. She also wrote down a number of uncomplimentary remarks about both her younger sisters, but particularly Rosemary. Rosemary, she wrote, was a wimp and a coward and was likely to turn out even worse than Gentian. Juniper had dared Rosemary to knock on the door of the new house next door, and Rosemary had said she would, but she hadn’t.
“And why couldn’t you do it yourself, Junie?” said Gentian. The sound of her own voice made her jump. It was getting late.
Gentian put the diary back, zipped up the cushion cover, shook that cushion and the one she had been sitting on with great vigor, and went on up to her own domain on the third floor to do her homework.
Chapter 3
Gentian liked her room. Juniper, predictably, hated it. Rosemary only liked it in the summer. Gentian always thought of this on first opening the door. She supposed Rosie meant the white walls and the green rugs. It was a perfect place for the telescope, especially in the winter, when she could make it as cold as she needed to for stargazing without any complaints from her family.