by PAMELA DEAN
Gentian shut her white-painted door behind her. She walked around her room, turning all the lights on one by one, naming their names as she did so. Tau Ceti, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Epsilon Indi, Epsilon Eridani, Sirius, Alpha Centauri. They were electrical fixtures now, but they had once burned gas, as stars all did. This was not a scientific observation, but she thought it might pass as a poetic one. She had tried to put in colored bulbs, to match the colors of the stars, but the strange light had been impossible to read by. She had the colored bulbs in a drawer, and put them in once a year, on her birthday.
Maria Mitchell was curled up in the middle of Gentian’s bed, with her tail wrapped around her nose. Gentian had named her five years ago, with the best intentions, but the name embarrassed her more every day. She had meant it as a tribute, but surely there were better tributes to the first woman astronomer than naming your cat after her. Luckily, Maria Mitchell had patches of brown and yellow and orange and white, so Gentian’s family had been calling her M&M for years. Gentian called her Murr, but could not seem to stop thinking of her by her full name.
Gentian decided not to bother her, and walked to the window, stepping deftly over stacks of books and piles of folded T-shirts and tangles of yarn. She climbed the scuffed cherrywood steps to the little platform under the dome, opened the dome up, put her hands on either side of the telescope, and leaned to the eyepiece. It was not a particularly exciting night for astronomy, but keeping one’s hand and eye in was a good thing. Besides, looking at the Pleiades with her eyes alone always made her want to find them through the telescope.
Something was blocking her view. Gentian made adjustments, blinked, and looked again.
It was the new house. It couldn’t be. It was one story tall; she was at the top of a three-story house. But there the new house was, with its mean windows and red vinyl siding whose boards were too wide for its height and shape. Gentian sat on her stool, dumbfounded, and gazed at the telescope for a few moments. Then she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and took out its manual. She had memorized it when she got the telescope, but sometimes looking at the printed text would make the right information stand out.
There was nothing in the manual she hadn’t thought of trying, and certainly no indication of how a telescope trained on the heavens from the third story could be blocked by a one-story house next door. It was a very simple mechanism.
Maybe Becky could come over for dinner sometime this week and help her figure things out. Becky didn’t know much about telescopes, not half as much as Gentian did, but she had a way of looking at something that was broken and seeing what was wrong with it. Sometimes she could fiddle with it and fix it, always looking vague and pretending she didn’t know what she was doing. This annoyed Gentian, and had done so since she first met Becky in preschool and Becky put the wheel back on Gentian’s truck for her. But Becky was a poet, and that was how she thought poets should behave. Gentian used to give her biographies of poets who behaved quite differently—which turned out to be most of them—but it never changed Becky in the least.
Gentian’s father called Becky’s talent “the laying on of hands.” Becky had done it for his computer once in a while, and had also dealt with the big kitchen mixer and the microwave. She even put microwaves and computers in her poetry, which helped resign Gentian to the way she moped around.
Gentian patted the telescope, put the manual away, and sat down at the desk with her geometry homework. She hardly needed her mind for it: it was a repeat of last week’s lessons because half the class had failed the pop quiz and, Mr. Schoenbaum said, a little more practice wouldn’t hurt the rest of them. Gentian scribbled diligently and thought about Junie’s diary.
It was odd. She would never dream of reading her mother’s or her father’s correspondence; and when Becky had left her alone in the room with Becky’s diary because her grandmother had called from Canada unexpectedly, Gentian shoved it under the pillow so it wouldn’t tempt her. She was just as curious about Becky, but she felt a moral obligation to her privacy that she didn’t feel toward Junie’s.
All’s fair in love and war, she thought. It’s not love, so it must be war. But if it is, what are we fighting for? Their father always used to ask them that, separating them when they were too young just to use words, and infuriating everybody, including their mother and probably the neighbors, by singing that stupid song.
They weren’t fighting for anything, though. They weren’t even fighting over anything, really. Becky, who had no sisters and adored her younger brother, had witnessed one stellar Gentian and Juniper fight in appalled silence, gone home, and called Gentian a few hours later to inform her that the two of them were like the fighting cocks in Plato, who fought only because the one would not give way to the other.
Gentian thought this missed the point. Juniper wanted things her way, all the time. Why should anybody give in to her?
She folded the finished geometry problems into her textbook and looked gloomily at her assignment list. Even putting it into a blank book with the Hertsprung-Russell diagram on the front and the Great Nebula in Andromeda on the back did not always compensate for the fact that it was full of things she had to do whether she wanted to do them or not. She was supposed to read about Alexander the Great, write a book report, and be prepared to discuss Act I of Julius Caesar.
Gentian picked up the Arden paperback of the play and ruffled through it. She liked her school, on the whole. The people who ran it believed that children learned better if they were not regimented too rigidly, if they were allowed to set their own schedules and learn at their own pace. You were spoken to if you skipped all your classes or never did any work, but there was none of the marking people tardy and taking attendance every hour and making a tremendous fuss about hall passes that ordinary high schools excelled in. You could take any semester’s class over and over again until you had learned what you needed to. Gentian got science credit for her astronomical work, though they wanted so much detailed reporting of what she had looked at that it was sometimes more trouble than it was worth.
Gentian’s mother said the school’s basic attitude was more like that of a college. She also said that she doubted very much that all children could learn this way, but she was willing to let hers try. Since they didn’t want to go to the regular school and be ordered around, they mostly went to school and mostly did their homework.
The one thing Gentian did not like about her school was the dreadful enthusiasm with which teachers were always trying out new things. She supposed it was only natural: if they hadn’t been enthusiastic about having a new kind of school, they’d still be teaching in the old kind. But you never knew what wild idea they would come up with. You didn’t have to go along with the ideas, but they looked sober and then coaxed if you didn’t, and they were not above using moral pressure or peer pressure to make you join in.
This year they had decided to have study groups. Since each of the Giant Ants was in a separate one, Gentian suspected that the point of the exercise was to shake up whatever habits and cliques people had fallen into and force them to make new friends. Since the Giant Ants were among the best habits Gentian had, this was annoying. The Giant Ants had agreed when they went from being Gentian and Becky and Erin and Steph and Alma, or “those five troublemakers,” or simply “Them,” to being a deliberate group, that they would always stand by one another and never laugh at one another’s ambitions. It was silly to try to keep them away from one another.
She supposed her study group was all right. It contained the best Latin scholar in probably the entire school, which was useful, and there were two good mathematicians and an artist and somebody who was good at biology. But none of them, not one except Gentian, could read aloud well, and the thought of reading Shakespeare with them, as Mrs. Peterson had suggested, made the back of Gentian’s neck prickly with embarrassment. She had said she was busy for every meeting time they proposed—she really was for some of them, what with Mercury and Saturn—and they h
ad gone ahead without her. But she would feel dumb when Mrs. Peterson started asking how reading Julius Caesar out loud made them think about it, if she had to say she hadn’t read it.
Gentian shut the book and took it with her downstairs. Her parents were in the kitchen, her mother reading to her father while he washed the dishes that could not be put into the dishwasher. Gentian lingered in the doorway, listening in the hope of being able to guess the book and make a grand entrance.
“‘Ronay heard music then, for many voices, ’” her mother read. She read flatly when it was narrative, but she was good at sounding different for each character.
“‘It was old music, written long ago, when the Moon had seemed a simple place; that didn’t matter. “Four things.” ’” Her mother gave him a low and mellow voice, like the one in which she talked to the cats but without the affectionate edge, and with no babytalk.
“‘He waved a finger toward the ceiling. “Air and light.” He picked up the glass of tea. “Water.” He pointed at Matt. “And people.” He sat on the arm of the chair, bringing himself a little lower than Matt. “With air and light and water, and people to work with them, we can make anything else we need.”
“Heinlein!” proclaimed Gentian, walking into the kitchen. Her parents adored Heinlein. He made her itchy; he made her feel as if she were sitting in a lecture hall and needed to sneeze.
“I can’t tell which one, though,” she added, as her mother looked up from the book.
“That’s because it isn’t Heinlein,” said her father, and made a tremendous splash with the dishmop.
Her mother shut the book over one finger and showed Gentian the cover. Growing up Weightless, it said, in gray-brown letters edged with blue. Gentian stood perfectly still. The phrase affected her as certain lines of Keats or Swinburne or Sara Teasdale had, as if it were full of ineluctable meaning. I’d like to do that, she thought, I’d like to grow up weightless. But what does it mean? She didn’t ask. She was afraid the book would be nothing like the effect of its title, and if she asked any questions her parents would be after her to read it.
“I was wondering if you’d like to read some Shakespeare, she said. “We have to discuss the first act of Julius Caesar in English tomorrow.”
“Not one of my favorites,” said her father, letting the water out of the sink.
“Act One’s short, isn’t it?” said her mother, putting down her own book and taking the Shakespeare from Gentian.
“Yes, but if we read one act with her, we’ll have to read them all. Ask Mrs. Peterson why you kids can’t read King Lear, Genny.”
“We get that after all the histories and comedies.”
“Too long to wait,” said her father. He dried his hands and turned around. “All right, we’ll do it. But it’s bedtime right after.”
“Okay,” said Gentian. She could read her history under the bedclothes by flashlight and write the book report on the bus. “Who’s going to rouse out the Sisty Uglers?”
“You, if you go on talking like that,” said her mother.
“I’ll do it,” said her father, “and you’ll wash the dishes for me tomorrow or I’ll know the reason why.” He hung the dish towel on its hook and left the kitchen.
“So how is it?” said Gentian to her mother. “Is he as bossy as Heinlein?”
“No,” said her mother. “In fact, he hardly deigns to tell you what’s happening. I’m not sure I want you reading it, though; you might get ideas.”
Gentian eyed her narrowly. It was probably a ploy to get her to read the book. Her mother just looked placid, a thing she was very well equipped to do, being so plump and round in the face. It was deeply deceptive, however: her mother was about as placid as a waterfall.
“What kind of ideas?”
“There’s a group of kids in here that reminds me of you and your cronies, that’s all. Smarter, though.”
She grinned, and Gentian made a face at her.
Gentian’s father called them from the living room, and they went in to join him and Juniper and Rosemary. Juniper looked sullen, and Rosemary eager, which was normal. Gentian sat on the couch with her mother, since Rosie had snagged the rocking chair and Junie was glowering all over the loveseat. Her father sat on the floor and gave out the parts; it was his turn, thank goodness. Her sisters didn’t fuss as much about his choices as about one another’s.
He gave Juniper the part of Cassio, which annoyed Gentian since it was her favorite. Then he gave Gentian Brutus, and Juniper scowled and Rosemary said, “Oh, good name for her!” and her father turned around and presented her with the part of Caesar’s wife and told her she had better start being above reproach. Rosemary pouted. Their mother received the part of Mark Antony with a quirk of her mouth; their father, having taken Caesar, briskly handed Flavius to Juniper, Marullus to Gentian, the carpenter to Rosemary, the cobbler to their mother, and the soothsayer to himself. Then he advised them to start, because bedtime waited for no man and for no girl neither. Shakespeare always made him talk like that.
They read Scene I well, Gentian thought. Juniper, as Flavius, scolded the carpenter and the cobbler for being out in their best clothes on a working day in much the same manner as she nagged at her sisters about leaving wet towels on the floor of the bathroom. Rosemary answered her saucily as the carpenter, and their mother produced, for the cobbler, a voice of bland innocence so like Juniper’s that the rest of the family howled with laughter and Juniper sulked, which caused her line, “I’ll about, and drive away the vulgar from the streets,” to be uttered with particular force and meanness.
That was the end of the first scene. For Scene II, they stopped to read the notes about the foot race, part of the celebration called Lupercalia, during which women who could not have children stood where the runners, who were considered holy because the Lupercalia was a religious feast, could touch them and maybe cure them. Rosemary said that the whole family should celebrate the Lupercalia and all the runners could touch Mrs. Zimmerman. Their mother said very sharply that Mrs. Zimmerman did not need a plague of children at her age and already played grandmother to the entire block, and that if any child of hers ever said anything to Mrs. Zimmerman about the Lupercalia or being barren or anything similar, said child would be very sorry indeed.
“Huh,” said Rosemary, quelled but not persuaded. “Mrs. Zimmerman has a sense of humor. Not like some people.”
“The quarelling’s for later,” said their father. “Save your energy. And you are Caesar’s wife, not carping Kate. Read.”
“You read,” said Rosemary. “Caesar’s got the first line.”
They read. Mark Antony, abjured to touch Calpurnia as he passed her in the race, said, “When Caesar says, do this, it is performed.” Caesar’s real-life daughters giggled, and Caesar frowned horribly at them. Then he changed into the soothsayer, and, in thrilling accents, demanded Caesar’s attention; Casca said, “Bid every noise be still,” and their father, once more in Caesar’s voice, said, “Would I could do so much in my own household.”
“Caesar expected to do it to the world, and look what happened to him,” said Gentian.
“Casca expected it for Caesar,” said their mother. “Though you don’t notice Caesar protesting.”
“Get on with the play, for God’s sake, or we’ll be here until midnight,” said Juniper.
“It’s my homework,” said Gentian, “and I like the—the—”
“Exegesis,” said her mother, briskly. “But we can do that afterwards, and Junie can go to bed.”
The soothsayer said, “Beware the Ides of March,” turned into Caesar, and said, “He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass on.” Then Cassius and Brutus had a long conversation. Juniper, as Cassius, invited Gentian, as Brutus, to come along and watch the race in a tone about as friendly as the one she employed to tell Gentian it was Gentian’s turn to take the kitchen scraps out to the compost pile. Gentian had no trouble saying, “I am not gamesome” in a weary voice.
Juniper an
swered, “You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand over your friend that loves you.”
Gentian forgot she was speaking to her sister and gave Brutus’s speech of excuse with what she hoped was great conviction. She ended, “Poor Brutus, with himself at war, forgets the show of love to other men.” Brutus needs the Giant Ants, she thought, not these weirdos. She wondered what the Elizabethan would be for “Giant Ants,” and had to work not to laugh.
Juniper answered, “Then, Brutus, I have much mistook your passion” convincingly enough that Rosemary did not giggle. They argued for a while; then the sound of a crowd cheering made Brutus say, “I do fear the people choose Caesar as their king,” and they were off conspiring. Cassius, rather as Juniper might have described Rosemary’s malingering of a Monday morning with her homework undone, explained how Caesar couldn’t swim well and occasionally got sick and acted piteous, which meant he could not be a god and therefore was not fit to rule Rome.
Brutus noted another cheer from the crowd, but did not otherwise reply to Cassius. Gentian marked this technique down for future use with her actual elder sister.
Cassius, unaware of this subsidiary plot, began the famous speech they always wanted you to learn in school; Juniper might indeed still, several years later, have it by heart. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” My fault certainly isn’t in my stars, thought Gentian. Then came the temptation: “‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar, ’” and more ranting against Caesar. When Cassius had done, Brutus allowed as how Cassius had a point, which Brutus had been thinking about already, and said they would talk about it later. It was a shifty speech, moving back and forth from agreement to hesitation, like Gentian’s father when he brought in stray cats or dogs and had to agree that they would be a terrible nuisance, without ever planning to take them away again.