by PAMELA DEAN
“You always take whatever I’m short of,” said her mother, petulantly for her. “Have a carrot, if you must scavenge.”
“And stay the hell away from me,” said Juniper.
Gentian stabbed a finger into the batter and fled, followed by imprecations from Juniper and a mild, “Genny, you cannot resist temptation,” from her mother; but by no actual thrown objects. She went out onto the front porch, licking her finger. Spice cookies.
The autumn night smelled of them already: damp, sweet, crisp all at once. Moths still darted and fluttered around the porch light. Gentian sat on the swing and addressed them. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” she said. She felt, all of a sudden, profoundly mournful.
Why had Becky gone after Micky and his butterfly net, anyway? The butterflies hardly lived at all: what did cutting their lives short signify in a scheme of things that had started four billion years ago in an explosion so grandiose as to make every one since look like a cap pistol?
Becky would say that that was why, of course: If they had so little you mustn’t take any of it away from them. “Unto every one that hath,” said Gentian, who had attended Alma’s church with Alma for a year to see if the heavens really did declare the glory of God’s handiwork, “shall be given, and he shall have in abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
The moths were not impressed. Gentian looked at them carefully. It seemed suddenly important to appreciate them before the frost got them. They were not very easy to appreciate. They were handsome enough in a somber way, being triangular with mottled gray and brown markings, like a faded Oriental carpet designed by an aesthete. But Gentian knew, because when her mother sat on the porch with anybody she always said it, that these were the moths of the cutworm caterpillar that would ooze along below the surface of the soil and nip off the stems of young seedlings. After they had slaughtered the innocents, they turned themselves into moths and hung around porch lights to inspire adolescent angst. Gentian grinned suddenly.
At dinner, she said, “We need to read Act Two before next Monday.”
“Let’s do it tonight, then,” said Rosemary. “I’ve got a Girl Scout hike on Sunday.”
“You’re going to make us read the whole play?” said Juniper.
Gentian noted the pause where her sister had almost added what their father called an adverse qualifier before the word “play.”
“We always do,” she said.
“Well, I’m tired of it,” said Juniper.
She got tired of something about once a week. Gentian, who was tired of Juniper’s tiredness, did not offer the usual panacea.
“And,” said Juniper, after an expectant pause during which Gentian carefully did not look at their mother, “I don’t want you to iron all my shirts.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said their mother.
“Two faces spited,” said their father, nodding at her.
Gentian liked it when they did this in a benevolent atmosphere, but she hated it to be directed at her.
“You never iron my shirts,” said Rosemary.
Gentian gazed at her in hurt disbelief, even as her mouth said automatically, “T-shirts big enough for four of you that you’re just going to throw under your bed don’t need ironing.”
“I do not—”
“Girls,” said their mother. “Stop it at once. Somebody is going to shoot Francis Ferdinand any moment now, and then there’ll be no turning back.”
“Wrong war,” said Juniper, for some reason now allied with their parents and no longer angry.
“They’re all wrong,” said her father.
“In any case,” said their mother, “Gentian will help to iron Juniper’s shirts and, as always, help Rosie clean her closet, and Juniper and Rosemary will help her read Act Two of Julius Caesar after supper.”
Gentian was strongly tempted to let out a howl of outrage, but instead looked in mute appeal at her father, who took the cue for once and said, “It has never seemed to me that these are equitable bargains. One’s opportunities to show off and to painlessly absorb Western culture are curiously absent from ironing and cleaning closets and abundantly present in the reading aloud of Shakespeare.”
“However,” said Gentian’s mother, “the opportunities to keep this household running smoothly are equivalent.”
Gentian opened her mouth, and her father shook his head at her. Gentian said bitterly to her mother, “I thought you were a feminist.”
“Being a feminist doesn’t mean you can neglect the household,” said her mother, sharply for her. Then she added, “I don’t have any boys to give the ironing to while you mow the lawn, Genny. It’s all girls hereabouts.”
“Like a utopian science fiction novel,” said her father helpfully.
They were doing it again. Fundamentally, they were always with one another. You could not divide and conquer.
“Besides,” said her mother, “you seem rather too attached to the parts of feminism that say you needn’t do things women traditionally do, and rather too unattached to the parts that say those things are worthy.”
“I don’t care if they’re worthy,” said Gentian, “they’re boring.”
“So’s Shakespeare,” said Juniper.
“So are you,” said Rosemary, to Juniper.
“Was that the Zimmerman telegram?” said their father, to their mother.
“Very like,” she answered wearily.
Gentian, watching her parents commiserate over their offspring, kept quiet, with an effort she supposed nobody would ever credit her with. She watched Junie, and when Junie had thought out whatever she was going to say, Gentian spoke first. “Something’s the matter with my telescope,” she said.
Juniper got up and left the room, not without dignity.
“Can I have her dessert?” said Rosemary.
“No,” said their mother, still looking at their father. She had laid down her fork and put her hands on the edge of the table, as if about to get up, but after a moment their father got up instead, and went after Juniper.
“If she wants to talk to Daddy,” said Rosemary, taking the cornbread from Juniper’s plate and buttering it, “all she has to do is ask.”
“Rosemary,” said their mother, “a little less spite masquerading as precocious perspicacity, if you please.”
“I am not spiteful!”
“Just fed up,” said Gentian.
“Fine,” said their mother, standing up after all. “You may sympathize with one another while you clear the table and clean up the kitchen. Gentian, the last time you gave your cat shrimp she threw it up on the bathroom floor and your father stepped in it at four in the morning.”
“That was a hairball. The shrimp was coincidental.”
“And when did you last give her any Petromalt?” Her mother left without waiting for an answer, which was both deeply unfair and a profound relief, given that the answer would have to be, “sometime last month.”
Gentian looked at Rosemary. “What is dessert?” she said. “Ice cream,” said Rosemary. She wrinkled her delicate nose and added, “And Junie’s spice cookies, if you think they’re not poisoned.”
“I,” said Gentian, “shall be thy taster, small sister. If by the time the dishes are done my taste of the dough hath not killed me, you may safely eat.”
They cleared the table, scraped the dishes, and loaded the dishwasher in amiable silence. Juniper was accustomed to being very fussy about how things were put into the dishwasher. When Rosemary put the big plastic strainer into the top rack, thus displacing several mugs to the bottom and ousting the cheese grater entirely, Gentian just smiled and washed the grater by hand. In her present mood, she rather liked the way it shredded the sponge.
“Genny,” said Rosemary as they were wiping down the counters.
Gentian, occupied with wondering whether she should make her parents’ after-dinner coffee, since they seemed to have forgotten it, jumped slightly and said, “What?”
“Nothing,” said Rosemary, scrubbing away at a grape-juice stain that had been there since she was about ten months old.
“Oh, please,” said Gentian. “That’s a Junie trick.”
“So’s that.”
“What, then?”
“Should I go out on a date?”
“Who with?”
“Just should I?”
“You’re eleven.”
“That’s what Mom said.”
“Well, so why are you asking me?”
“Well, Mom,” said Rosemary, abandoning the juice stain and rubbing away at the gray spot on the refrigerator where Junie had once put up a bumper sticker backed with very durable glue, “didn’t have a date at all until she was eighteen.”
Gentian had never thought about their mother’s first date. The information made her vaguely uneasy. “Look, Rosie,” she said. “Even Juliet was thirteen.”
“Mom said that, too.”
“Then why are you—”
“How old’ll you be when—”
“Thirty-five,” said Gentian, flinging the grater-chewed sponge into the soap dish and smearing her hands with the cream her mother used after gardening.
“Don’t you like anybody?”
“Sure,” said Gentian. She opened the freezer, and four boxes of film fell out. She caught the cascade of square plastic containers of tomato sauce that threatened to follow them and peered inside for the ice cream. “I like Becky, and Steph, and Erin, and Alma. Sometimes I even like you.”
Rosemary was bright red and had wound most of her hair around her wrist, but she met Gentian’s eyes squarely. “You know what I mean. Do you?”
“I’ll tell if you will.”
Rosemary looked wistful, but said nothing.
“And not a word to Junie,” said Gentian. It was both a threat and a promise.
“You go first.”
“Let’s get ice cream and take it out on the porch.”
The moths were still circling. It was too cold to eat ice cream out of doors. Gentian took a mouthful anyway. Rosemary clutched her bowl in both hands and eyed Gentian as she used to when Gentian would come home from school and read stories to her.
Gentian swallowed. The ice cream made a track of cold right down the center of her.
“All right,” she said. “There’s a boy called Jamie Barrows.”
“And he almost deserved it,” said Rosemary.
“Hush. We didn’t get him until sixth grade. He has an English accent and he uses words like—like Mom does when she’s mad and Dad does all the time. The first thing I ever heard him say was, ‘No, Mrs. Logan, I think the problem with “Young Goodman Brown” is that Hawthorne was concentrating on the accidental rather than the essential aspects of fiction. ’”
Rosemary looked baffled but respectful. “So he’s smart.”
“Very. And smart the way I like best. Like Becky.”
“So did you ever talk to him?”
“Mmmmmm. Well, once.”
“Well tell me.”
“In the library the summer after fifth grade.”
“Well tell me!”
“I was embarrassed,” said Gentian. “Because I was doing summer reading and I had an enormous stack of Goosebumps books.”
“So what happened?”
“So he said he read them too and we talked about why we liked them when they’re so awful.”
“So that was good?”
“... Yes.”
“You sound like something wasn’t good.”
“I don’t know,” said Gentian. “I never quite figured it out. He kept—he kept—he kept sounding like Daddy.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“He’s not my father.”
“Oh. That kind of sounding like Daddy.”
“Mmmm-hmm.”
“I thought you just meant he talked like him.”
“He kept laying down the law.”
“So what then?”
“So I thought about it a lot.”
“Did you talk to him any more?”
“A couple of times. There’s not much chance at school unless you want everybody to think you have a crush.”
“Who cares what they think?”
“I don’t care what they think,” said Gentian, quoting Erin, “but I don’t choose to come to their attention.”
Rosemary looked at her over the bowl of ice cream. “But you’re one of the big kids.”
“I don’t mean they’d beat me up, Rosie. I don’t want them thinking about me.” Rosemary opened her mouth. “It’s like the way sometimes you don’t want Junie thinking about you,” said Gentian. “She isn’t going to hit you. But she’ll say things.”
“Oh,” said Rosemary, looking absorptive.
“Now,” said Gentian, who was beginning to experience the slightly hollow feeling of somebody who has talked too much, “it’s your turn.”
“Well,” said Rosemary. She turned her head completely away from Gentian, tugged fiercely at her hair, and said, “I don’t like boys.”
Gentian considered her. She considered and rejected a number of responses, notably, “Well, you don’t have to.” Her mother could represent that viewpoint all too well. Finally she got caught up in the intellectual interest of the problem. “Well, I don’t know,” she said.
Rosemary unzipped the green cotton cover of the nearest cushion and then zipped it up again.
“Because,” said Gentian, thinking back to sixth grade, “if you don’t like them now I’m not sure if you ever will, because as far as I can tell they just get worse. It’s all downhill after they’re eleven.”
“It’s all downhill after everybody’s eleven, as far as I can tell,” said Rosemary. While she had been known to make similar remarks in a pointed fashion to annoy her older sisters, she seemed serious and unconscious enough that Gentian did not protest this time.
When she was sure Rosemary was not going to expand her observations, Gentian said, “Maybe it is, but we must get worse in different ways. Because I’m still friends with Becky and Steph and Erin and Alma. But we used to play with Micky and Aaron and—oh, what was his name, the kid with red hair—some Greek hero, we had it in English class and he hated it—”
“Orestes?”
“No, that’s Micky’s big brother; he was a pill, we never played with him. Jason, that’s it.”
“He was a pill too.”
“No, he wasn’t. He had a splendiferous rock collection, and he showed me how to test for different minerals.”
“He threw rocks at Ariel and me.”
“When?” demanded Gentian.
“Last summer.”
“See? That proves it. We weren’t playing with him by then. He was twelve. Anyway—we used to play with boys but they all got weird in a way that made us not want to play with them any more. But the girls all stuck together. Maybe it’s not because we’re girls. Maybe it’s just the Giant Ants. But we never deserted one another, even when some of us got breasts and some didn’t, and some of us have really easy periods and some have awful cramps.”
“When are you going to get breasts?” said Rosemary.
“Will you quit being a bratty little sister long enough to have a decent conversation?”
“I am having a decent conversation!”
“Twitting people about their tits is not decent.”
“I wasn’t twitting. I want to know. I’m more like you than I am like Junie, and I want to know how long I’ve got left to be a kid.”
Gentian looked at her. She was zipping up the cushion cover again. She was not smiling secretively as she would when teasing a sister. She probably meant it.
“You’ll be the first to know,” Gentian said, a little helplessly.
“When you were playing with those boys,” said Rosemary, “did you like them the way you like Jamie Barrows?”
“No,” said Gentian. “Steph did, and so did Erin. Alma and I thought they were crazy.”
�
�So maybe I’ll like boys when I’m older,” said Rosemary. She gave the cushion a vicious punch and added, “Even if they all turn into jerks on their twelfth birthdays.”
“Well, lots of girls like boys, jerks or not.”
“But not you?”
“Well—is Jamie Barrows a jerk?” said Gentian, as much to herself as to her sister.
“If I say yes you’ll hit me.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“You said he laid down the law. If he lays down the law, he’s a jerk.”
“You have no concept of jerkdom if you think that makes him a jerk.”
Rosemary sighed heavily. “Maybe I’ll be a nun,” she said. “Chanting cold hymns to the pale fruitless moon. Why should there be fruit on the moon, anyway?”
“You aren’t a Catholic. And nuns can be jerky too.”
“I’ll be a Buddhist nun.”
“You aren’t—”
“I’ll convert!” yelled Rosemary, and flung the pillow over the porch railing.
Gentian looked at her. “I’ve got a book about Buddhism,” she said. “You want to borrow it?”
“Fine!”
“You’re acting like Junie.”
“Junie would never read a book about Buddhism.”
“Never mind.”
Rosemary sat sulkily eating her half-melted ice cream. Gentian stirred hers around and around in the bowl. Finally she said, “Fruitless means barren.”
Rosemary scowled. Then she smiled. “So this is barren ice cream?” she said.
“Extremely,” said Gentian, and began to eat hers.
They sat silently, shivering a little in the autumn breeze. Gentian did not want to suggest going in. Somebody might still say something interesting. Finally their mother opened the front door, letting out the smell of brewing coffee, and said, “Drama calls, girls.”
They got up, without looking at one another, and went inside to read the second act of Julius Caesar. Gentian found herself feeling grateful that it was not Romeo and Juliet.
Chapter 6
It was almost midnight when they finished. Saturn would be setting; not long after, Mars would rise. Gentian went upstairs and set her alarm clock for seven, thinking she should really go to bed, thinking that she could always skip the whole morning’s school, thinking she should save doing that for some more truly spectacular astronomical event.