by PAMELA DEAN
“I want to see this house,” said Becky, looking back at her steadily. She did not seem disbelieving; nor was she wearing the broken-toaster expression. This was something less clinical. If Gentian had ever seen Becky look worried in the ten years they had known one another, she might have thought this look was worried.
She said reasonably, “Well, come over on Friday and you will.”
“I want to see it now.”
“And miss Biology?”
“Yes.”
“Well, all right.” Gentian shook the crumbs off her tray onto the pavement, and there was a rush of sparrows. “I don’t usually skip a whole day of school.”
“Well, we can get back by sixth period, I think. If we hurry.”
“The house will be there tomorrow, you know,” said Gentian, standing up nevertheless and scattering the sparrows.
“That’s just what I don’t know,” said Becky, flinging her remaining onion rings smartly over the table. The hovering sparrows settled. Gentian held her tongue. Steph had given them her french fries last time, and Gentian’s objection had begun a discussion, which still burst out occasionally, of whether birds had problems with their cholesterol. Nobody ever had bothered to go look it up, though Becky had asked their biology teacher.
They tipped their trash into the receptacle provided, stacked their trays, and caught a bus. Gentian’s stop was across the street from Memorial Park, a huge expanse of close green lawn, cunningly dotted with clumps of crabapple trees, sweeping steeply upwards to the limestone arch that gave it its name. Although she knew what lay on the other side of the arch—formal rose gardens, a pine grove, a playground, and a little stream—in the benign autumn sunlight it looked, to Gentian, immeasurably tempting, like the entrance to Elfland, or some English garden complete with talking toad or psammead or the ghosts of Elizabethan children, going about their daily business. She touched Becky’s shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Becky looked at her, and shrugged. “All right.”
They trudged up the winding sidewalk, kicking at the narrow red crabapple leaves that lay on it in neat overlapping lines, as Gentian’s father would arrange crackers on a tray for a party. Gentian could feel Becky looking at her, and then looking away. It occurred to her that such a request, which she had made out of sheer exuberance at the weather and out of the restlessness autumn always produced in her, had probably made Becky think Gentian had something important to tell her. She cast about for something.
They reached the top of the hill, panting slightly, and passed under the cool damp shadow of the arch. The shrieks of children on the swings of the playground came to them on the breeze, with a mingled odor of pine and water.
“Remember that boy with the red hat?” said Becky.
Gentian assembled her mind. “In fifth grade?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes, I do. You yelled at him for chasing butterflies.” Becky had chased him down that very hill and into the stream, yelling blue murder, and come back with the butterfly net, which she had tried to break over her knee and eventually had to go fling on the railroad track where, in younger and less opinionated days, she and Gentian had laid pennies to be flattened. Gentian and Alma had tried to persuade her that it was dangerous to the train to make it run over a butterfly net, but Becky had been unmoved.
“He asked me to go to a movie,” said Becky.
“'Which one?”
“Just a movie.”
“When?”
“Sometime,” said Becky, smiling with one side of her mouth in the way that brought out her much-detested dimple.
“Has he,” demanded Gentian, sitting down on the nearest wooden bench, “said one word to you in the entire intervening time?”
“No,” said Becky.
“So are you going?”
“If I can think of a movie. We were going to see Roan Innish with Steph, weren’t we, and you wanted to see Much Ado About Nothing.”
“Make him take you to see Frankenstein,” said Gentian, who had refused to see any movie made from a book she had read ever since she first watched, with horrified disbelief, The Wizard of Oz on television.
“He wouldn’t like it,” said Becky. “Anyway, Alma wants to see it.”
“How do you know he wouldn’t like it?”
“He thinks scientists are always the good guys.”
“How in the world do you know that?”
“I could tell,” said Becky, “when I yelled at him about the butterflies.”
“That’s a long time ago,” said Gentian, cautiously.
“Do you want to have kids?”
“What? No.”
“Do you think it’s a vast injustice that your moods should be dictated by a bunch of chemicals?”
“Yes, and you know it. What—”
“You thought all that in fifth grade.”
“Oh.” Gentian considered. “Well, look, then, Frankenstein would be good for him, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, probably, but if I’m going to do him good I should be the one to take him. Maybe next time.”
“There hasn’t even been a this time yet.”
“Well, it can’t be Frankenstein this time if there is a this time.”
“Do you think he’d let you?”
“What? Take him to a movie?”
“I know,” said Gentian. “If he doesn’t, he can forget about you.”
“What are you laughing about?”
“You felt like that in the fifth grade, too.”
“What does growing up mean, then?”
“Forgetting all the good parts,” said Gentian, with finality.
“When I am an old woman,” said Becky, “I shall still wear purple.”
“Well, you’re different.”
“We’re all different. Maybe that’s what we forget.”
“What’s his name?” said Gentian.
“Micky.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, I know. Micky and Becky. Blech.”
“Has he got a middle name?” Becky’s middle name was Letitia. Micky and Letitia, thought Gentian, and swallowed a giggle. Her own middle name was every bit as bad.
“Should it become an issue,” said Becky, stretching her legs out in front of her, "I’ll ask him.”
“I always thought Steph would be the first.”
“Yes, me too. Or maybe Alma—she’s so unpredictable.”
“Are you going, then?”
“Maybe.”
“Henry V’s at the Riverside. You wanted to see that again. And it hasn’t got any embarrassing parts—or at least, they’re all in French.”
“Now that,” said Becky, “is a thought.” She sat up and jammed her hat more firmly onto her head. “I want to see that house, and I could look at your telescope at least briefly.”
They walked to Gentian’s street, kicking at the leaves to make them rustle. The tall Victorian houses stood benignly in their brilliant yards, set about with juniper and elm and late zinnias and a dozen kinds of chrysanthemum.
“There,” said Gentian, pointing at the new house.
Becky eyed it from under her hat. “It looks as if a tornado just set it down there by accident.” She took her hat off and looked at the house some more. “You’d expect it to look a bit cowed, somehow,” she said, “like those little tiny houses on Summit Avenue next to all the mansions. But it doesn’t.”
“No,” said Gentian, arrested. “It looks smug.” This anthropomorphic remark bothered her; she added, “It must be the position of the windows.”
“Mmmm,” said Becky. She went on gazing at the house, and turning her hat around in her hands. “I want to see all around it.”
“Well, come on; they never come out, and if they did that’d be interesting, even if they yelled at us.”
They walked up the new side of the driveway. Becky looked at the house, and Gentian looked at Becky. “It’s remarkably ugly,” said Becky.
“Junie likes it.”
&nbs
p; “Because it’s modern?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s not why I think it’s ugly. I think there’s something wrong with the proportions. And the siding’s an awful color. It’s hard to look at. It makes my eyes water.”
They reached the top of the driveway, and without further consultation turned onto the little walkway that led to the new house’s back door. The concrete was glaring white, the lawn was glaring green, without a dandelion or a bit of mullein in it anywhere. Gentian wondered what they had used on it, and whether it would mess up her mother’s wildflowers. Under that lawn were Rosie’s crocuses and Juniper’s pink tulip bulbs and some yellow flag iris that Gentian had put in last spring. She hoped they would come up and break the sidewalk.
The walk split when it got to the back door, and led around to both sides of the house. Becky and Gentian, again without consulting one another, turned right to walk towards the Zimmermans’. There was a flower bed between the sidewalk and the back of the house. It had been filled with polished black stones. In the long narrow windows above it the shades were drawn down to the windowsills.
“It’s not very big when you look right at it,” breathed Becky as they rounded the corner, “but it looms out of the corner of your eye.”
She did not correct this potentially ambiguous statement, and Gentian did not feel inclined to laugh at it. They walked on, between the new house and the Zimmermans’ house, on bright clean concrete, in a cold dark shade. The side of the house looked almost black. The windows on this side were also covered with drawn shades. They came out past the house and the dark evergreens that hid its foundation in front, and with one sudden accord bolted across the bright green lawn to the good, cracked, grayish public sidewalk with its covering of leaves. They looked at the house again. It was small and crouched and red.
“Let’s go look at that telescope,” said Becky.
That telescope, looked at, proved to have nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Becky could not, even by depressing it to the utmost, make the house next door appear through it—which was just what Gentian would have expected, if anybody had asked her.
They stood in Gentian’s room with Maria Mitchell winding around their feet and scolding them, gazing at one another Becky with pensive speculation and Gentian with a hopeless bafflement.
“If you were Steph,” said Becky at last.
“It’s not a practical joke. What would be the point?”
“I know.”
“Maybe now you’re curing things just by deciding to come look at them.”
“Tell all the AIDS cases to line up below,” said Becky, in a voice of utter desolation, and sat down on Gentian’s bed.
“You know I meant fix.”
“You didn’t say it.”
Not saying what you meant was the mortal sin in Becky’s calendar: the only sin, Gentian sometimes thought; chasing butterflies fell into some other category altogether.
“I’m sorry. I was just joking.”
“What would be the point?” said Becky, still desolately. She fell over backwards on the bed and put the nearest pillow over her face.
“Don’t be depressed, Becky. I can’t stand it right now.”
“Why right now especially?” said Becky from under the pillow.
That, thought Gentian, was a very good question. “It’s fall,” she said at last.
Becky threw the pillow at her and sat up. She was laughing; but it seemed like polite laughter, as if Gentian were an aunt who had told her a joke.
Chapter 5
Becky declined to stay for dinner, and Gentian was obscurely relieved. She felt as she had the day after Steph’s thirteenth birthday. Erin had hosted a slumber party to celebrate. They all stayed up until eight in the morning, when Erin’s father cooked them pancakes. Then they slept until noon, when Erin’s little sister burst into the nice dark basement rec room with a demand to watch television.
Gentian had then walked home in bright October sunlight, rather like today’s; negotiated a stay of execution on her Saturday chores; and before the puzzled gaze of Maria Mitchell, fallen into bed in her best blue jeans and the oversized pintucked white shirt that took so long to iron, and slept for seven hours, after which she gloomed around all evening, picked a fight with Junie, and went to bed at ten. That Sunday then felt like Saturday, because she did her Saturday chores. Monday felt like Sunday, which made going off to school feel most unjust.
This was even worse. Today felt like Sunday, and Saturday, and a day she had missed school, all jumbled up. She didn’t even know what her homework was.
Well, there. Say it was a day she’d been sick. She would, on such days, call Becky, Steph, and Alma, and that would get her all the assignments except Latin. Nobody she liked was in her Latin class. Nobody else in the Giant Ants was taking Latin at all, though Gentian had tried to persuade them repeatedly. Alma and Steph, who did everything together, were taking Spanish so they could read Don Quixote and decide whether it was better than Man of la Mancha. Becky was taking French so she could read Cyrano de Bergerac. Erin was taking Russian because she wanted to be an astronaut and she thought making all the cosmonauts speakEnglish was unfair.
Gentian called Alma first. She loved every voice in that family except that of Alma’s mother. The rest were dark, furry, complicated voices, but Mrs. Jackson sounded like a hammer hitting tacks into a plaster wall: flat, flat, flat, thud. She said, “Well, hello, Genny,” in just that way, and fetched Alma, who demanded, without greeting or preface, “Are you sick?”
“No, truant disposed.”
“I would not hear your enemy say so,” said Alma, elongating the vowels of Hamlet’s line and blurring the r’s almost to nothing, “but I believe you. I missed Geometry today, but I got it from Steph. Problems eleven to nineteen in Chapter Two and the odd-numbered ones in Chapter Three, except seventeen. English is Act Two. Creative Writing is write a sonnet or else an essay about why not.”
“Why not what?” said Gentian, scribbling.
“Why not write a sonnet.”
“How long?”
“Fourteen lines,” said Alma, and cackled.
“Alma.”
“One page, both sides.”
“Thanks.”
“You plan to be truant next Monday?”
“I didn’t plan, it just happened. Why?”
“It’s Steph’s birthday. We could take her out for lunch.”
“Okay. What does she want?”
“Makeup.”
“Uck.”
“It’s not your birthday.”
“I’ll give her a Dayton’s gift certificate. Maybe she’ll buy something else with it.”
“Reformer.”
“I am not. I’d just get her the wrong color, anyhow.”
“Steph thinks you can wear makeup and still find Narnia.”
“Well, so do I, but why make things harder?”
“Because she’s Steph.”
Gentian admitted the justice of this remark, thanked Alma, hung up, and called Steph, who answered the phone on the first ring. She had a low but rather hesitant voice, with just the ghost of a stutter.
“It’s only me,” said Gentian.
“Better than Caitlin’s E-mail buddies. Were you sick today?”
“Truant.”
“I almost was too,” said Steph. “It was a gorgeous day, and I was thinking about painting the sumac with Alfalfa lying in it. But then I wouldn’t have seen Randy again until next Friday.”
Gentian had never understood why anybody should want to see Randy at all: she considered him sarcastic without being witty, and he was redheaded as well. Far too much like Junie. But Steph didn’t have to live with Junie.
Gentian made a noncommittal noise, and Steph told her the history assignment.
“Thanks,” said Gentian. “Did Randy smile at you today?”
“He looked at me over his glasses,” said Steph, “with his beautiful blue eyes. Oh, and Genny—Micky Adomaitis talked
to Becky in the hall.”
“He probably wanted his butterfly net back.”
“That was his butterfly net?” said Steph, who had joined the magic circle in third grade but missed having fifth with the rest of them because the school district got divided that year and she lived on the wrong side of the highway.
“The very one.”
“He’s cute,” said Steph judiciously, “but the stuff he wrote for Tesseract was awful.”
“He doesn’t write poetry too, does he?” said Gentian. The notion of Becky's taking up with a fellow poet was alarming.
“No, it was short stories.”
“Oh, okay.”
They said good-bye, and Gentian ran through the list of people in her Latin class. The study-group Latinist was two semesters ahead of her, so she was no use. She supposed she could try Randy. Then she could tell Steph all about it, especially if she managed to mention Steph and got a good response to report. But Randy would be so wearing; and then, too, he might say something mean about Steph, whereupon Gentian would have to find some suitable rebuke and then not tell Steph about it.
She called the quietest member of the class and gratefully received her stammered explanation of the assignment.
It was dark by now. The weather forecast had said the night would be clear. Mars would not rise until almost midnight, and Jupiter was still hiding near the sun; but Saturn would be up and bright. Gentian climbed the stairs, opened the dome, and looked through her telescope.
The dull red side of the new house smote her eye like a bonfire. Gentian jumped back from the telescope and stepped on Maria Mitchell’s tail. Murr yelped and vanished under the bed.
“I’ll bring you some shrimp,” Gentian told her, still eyeing the telescope. She got out its manual again, and then dug into the closet and found all the books she had used while she was researching buying one, and all the ones she had used when she thought she was going to build her own. She stacked them all on her desk and went downstairs.
Her mother was making salad. Her father was frying shrimp. Junie was beating batter with a wooden spoon and complaining bitterly about her parents’ presence in the kitchen. Gentian decided against stealing a fingerful of dough from her, and took a radish from her mother’s cutting board instead.