by PAMELA DEAN
Dominic said, “What was the tower without a crest?”
“Topless,” said Rosemary, and then giggled and turned red.
“Rosie, for heaven’s sake. Ilium had topless towers,” said Juniper.
“They didn’t finish the Tower of Babel,” said Gentian.
Dominic leaned his elbows on the table and stared at her until she felt herself turning redder than Rosemary, and she hadn’t even made a dirty remark. “We’ll have you, too,” said Dominic.
“You still haven’t said why you want to—”
“Which is the water without any sand?”
He was like their father, thought Gentian, a curious collection of nonsequiturs.
“Tears,” said Rosemary, who loved riddles and was obviously recovering her equanimity.
“We’ll have Rosie, too,” said Dominic.
“Why do you want to?” said Gentian.
“You think about those riddles,” said Dominic, “and you’ll know. Have you a chamber here where we could build it?”
“The attic,” said Juniper, now furiously beating the fudge.
“That’s mine,” said Gentian.
“You don’t need all that space.”
“You should have entire control over when we may use it, Genny,” said Dominic.
Gentian felt a most peculiar shiver up her spine when he used her name. She was not altogether sure she liked it.
“Well, in that case,” she said.
“Excellent,” said Dominic. He got up. “I will requite you,” he said, bestowed a particular smile upon Gentian, and let himself out the back door.
Juniper turned around from pouring the fudge onto a sheet of waxed paper. “It’ll be cool enough to eat in just a minute,” she said.
The back door shut firmly.
“What did you say to him?” demanded Juniper, and banged her empty saucepan into the sink.
“Nothing!” said Rosemary hotly, answering the spirit of her inquiry.
“I said we could use the attic to build the time machine,” said Gentian, answering the letter.
Juniper regarded them with equal ill favor and stamped out. Her feet thundered up the steps, and her bedroom door banged resoundingly.
“Well, we can eat all the fudge, anyway,” said Gentian.
After they had eaten a great deal of it, she got ready for Becky’s arrival. This entailed putting the green sheets on the bed, because Becky thought the white ones with the red pattern looked like something out of a cheap horror movie. It also entailed making a batch of tuna-fish-and-cashew sandwiches, a batch of cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, a batch of hummus-and-pickle sandwiches, and an apple-and-celery salad. She stole some of Junie’s spice cookies and legitimately acquired from her mother bags of pretzels and corn chips as well as a large jug of cranberry juice and a six-pack of lemon soda. She put the perishable parts of this feast into the cooler Rosemary took when she went camping with the Girl Scouts.
She got out four fat beeswax candles, her grandmother’s lace tablecloth, and the plates from the set of dishes Murr’s bowls belonged to. She swept the clutter of notebooks, rulers, Rick Brant books, graph paper, and gardening texts from the top of her cedar chest, spread the cloth where they had been, and set two places.
Murr lay down in the middle of the lace cloth and tucked her feet in all around.
“Becky’s coming,” Gentian told her. “You can steal corn chips.”
Maria Mitchell gazed at her distantly, like somebody scanning past a familiar object in search of the unfamiliar. Did cats use averted vision? Were their eyes even structured the same way? Gentian rubbed Murr behind the ears and put the items she had removed from the chest into the boxes designated for them in the closet.
As an afterthought, she dusted both bedside tables and swept the floor. Murr chased the broom, sneezing. Gentian brushed her vigorously, and then picked the tricolored hairs from the lace tablecloth. Her father said that gracious living was impossible if one had animals, but this was disingenuous. Gentian knew that in the first place he had no desire for gracious living and in the second he was merely pretending that he understood how a constant stream of strays might be troublesome to some people, notably her mother.
Or possibly Junie. Her mother was gracious, but gracious living was more up Junie’s alley. Murr didn’t like the strays very much either. Gentian thought it was because she was solitary by nature; Juniper said it was because the strays were uniformly ill-behaved; Rosemary said Murr would like them fine if anybody gave her a chance.
“Would you?” said Gentian to Murr, pausing in the act of putting her broom away. “Or would you eat them up, like Lessingham’s daughter?”
Murr blinked, benignly. Her namesake had been solitary, after all.
Friday morning was warm and sunny and striped with long clouds. Gentian got to school in time for assembly, earning an extravagantly raised eyebrow from Erin and a giggle from Steph.
A series of students read announcements about various clubs and activities. They all sang “Turn the World Around,” though it was almost as unsuitable as “The Star-Spangled Banner” for large untrained groups to sing. Then the principal came to address them, as she did every few weeks. Most of her addresses dealt with internal school matters and were very funny, but this one did not and was not. A junior at the other downtown high school, she said, had been attacked in the parking lot of that school on the previous evening, as she left after attending a meeting of the chess club. The assailant was another student at that school, and had been caught already; but the incident had crystallized a lot of people’s anxieties about how freely students of the open school came and went at all hours and wandered around downtown in between.
She laid down a series of new rules. Since she said at the beginning that the rules would be printed up and distributed to the students, Gentian ceased to listen at this point, except to notice the groans and outcries and mutters of her fellow students as restriction followed restriction in the list.
“They’ll never enforce that,” said Steph in Gentian’s ear. “If we wanted to live like that, we’d go to Roosevelt. And look what good that did her.”
“Why don’t they restrict the boys?” said Gentian, almost idly. “I mean, if it’s the boys who they think are going to do the damage, why make the girls creep around like Chuchundra the Muskrat, as if we were the guilty ones?”
“Most of the boys aren’t guilty.”
“None of the girls are.” Gentian considered this statement, and added scrupulously, “Not of raping other girls in parking lots, anyway.”
“Where would I fit in?” said Erin. “Is it time to get that big G tattooed on my forehead?”
“Then you’d have to live with it forever,” said Gentian.
“Besides,” said Steph, “they worry about the boys getting beaten up or mugged and told them to travel in pairs too.”
“In passing,” said Gentian.
“Let’s see what it looks like on the printed list, okay?”
Gentian desisted, less because of Steph’s request than because of Erin’s question.
Everybody said Erin looked like a boy. Erin said cheerfully that this suited her. Superficially, Erin looked a lot like Gentian. She was middling tall, and long-limbed and pale, with brown hair, a little lighter and straighter than Gentian’s, and medium blue eyes, and a face with all the features in the right place and more or less the right size, neither cramped nor expansive nor breathtaking. But even when Gentian was four and had hair a quarter-inch long because Junie had cut chunks out of it with a pair of plastic scissors, nobody ever mistook her for a boy.
After years of intermittent consideration of the issue, beginning on the day Erin showed up for kindergarten and Mr. Johnson called her Eric, Gentian had decided that Erin made the question of what one meant by looking like a girl or looking like a boy completely meaningless.
This decision was alternately intriguing and very annoying. Along with the biography of Maria Mitchell that had se
t Gentian on the path leading to the telescope and, eventually, a desert, an observatory, and comets, she had been given biographies of Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The horrors of nineteenth-century sexism in all its glory, even as recounted in books intended for children, and books moreover whose essential point was that everything was all better now, had moved Gentian to the greatest fury she had ever known. She had figured out that this was because her righteous indignation at injustice, at idiocy, at pompous cruelty, at unthinking insult, at intellectual waste and spiritual blight, was colored by the personal, by the thought that she could have been one of those girls, one of those struggling women; could have been one even in today’s world, in some other country, in the wrong family.
Gentian had hated men, including her father, for about six months. She realized one day that, in the absence of specific insults to herself, she did not have the emotional fiber to keep up such a hot white vigorous fire; this was distressing for a while, but then, perhaps, evidence of a cool scientific temperament, though of course an even cooler one would not have taken things quite so personally to begin with. Then again, you couldn’t leave the personal out. Even Maria Mitchell couldn’t. Scientists were human too, perhaps unfortunately.
During the time that she was hating men, Erin made her uneasy. She and Erin had always been at opposite sides of the arc formed by the Giant Ants: Gentian was friends with Becky, Alma, Steph, and Erin, in that order. But she and Erin shared a few things the others did not: a passion for A Girl of the Limberlost, a liking for Lock and Dam Number One quite in excess of the interest to be got from the guided tours; a fondness for anchovies on pizza; a propensity for walking in the rain.
Erin derived an enormous delight from being taken for a boy. Gentian had never seen such a reaction in anybody else. One of her cousins was always being taken for a girl, and he beat up anybody who teased him; Rosie had gone through a stage of being thin, active, plain, and short-haired, but when she was taken for a boy she put on pink shirts and stuck barrettes in her hair. But Erin loved the mistake; she looked bland, she dressed confusingly, she egged them on.
Now Gentian looked at Erin, as they stood up and waited for the crowd to disperse so they could go off to class, and said, not sarcastically, since she hated skirts herself, “If you couldn’t get a tattoo, you’d have to dress like a girl.”
“Whatever that means,” said Erin, predictably.
“Don’t start,” moaned Steph, herding them ahead of her towards the doors. “Don’t start on skirts. And Gentian, you have got to stop talking as if there is No Difference Between Boys and Girls.”
“I never said that. There’s just not much. And people are very stupid about what there is. Like now. Why don’t they make all the boys pay for statistical aggressiveness, size, and anatomical advantage? Instead of making all the girls pay? Don’t we pay enough when the prevention fails, without having the prevention be a punishment all by itself? What’s the matter with them?”
Steph shrugged. “Ask them.”
“They are them,” said Gentian, mostly to make Becky laugh when she told her about it later, but also because it was true.
“No,” said Erin, “we are Them.”
“Giant Ants,” they chorused, “from White Sands.”
Jamie Barrows went by, casting upon them an odd, rueful, maybe wistful glance. Gentian felt herself blush. Her immediate instinct was to disassociate herself from her friends, go after him, ask him something, anything; to make herself pleasant. She took Steph’s arm instead. Love me, love my ants, she thought, and giggled, and looked mysterious when Erin asked her what was so funny all of a sudden.
She and Steph were going to the same part of the building as Jamie, and when she saw his curly head and blue denim shirt as he paused at his locker, she thought suddenly, “He is them. He really is.”
They walked past him, going fast now because Ms. Ogden made sarcastic remarks when you were late. Gentian nodded at him. He smiled back. He hardly seemed big enough to be the enemy. And what had he done to her, anyway, to make her think of him that way? Laid down the law. Rosie said that made him a jerk; Gentian had found herself thinking it made him the enemy; it did, maybe, make him suspect. You couldn’t trust him to understand important things. Then again, you couldn’t trust most people to understand anything at all. That was why the Giant Ants were so important.
Steph caught her elbow as she walked right past the door of their classroom.
“Thanks,” said Gentian, following her in.
“Dreaming of Jamie Barrows?” said Steph.
Gentian felt herself blush again, which of course made Steph smile. They sat down in the back of the room, Gentian behind Steph since she was the taller. “More like a nightmare,” said Gentian.
Steph turned sideways in her seat and cast on Gentian a familiar, mildly exasperated look. She had a delicate face that she had forbidden everybody to call “elfin,” and big dark eyes with long lashes. It was not a face that could really look as exasperated as Gentian knew Steph often felt. “Think less, dream more,” Steph said, and turned smartly around again before Gentian could answer. Her permed dark hair and straight thin shoulders were as unresponsive as a statue’s.
Gentian wrote her a long indignant note instead, started to tear it up, and then saved it to show to Becky.
Chapter 7
On Friday evening Juniper electrified her family by announcing, in the interval between dinner and dessert, that she was going out on a date: not this weekend, which was booked, but next weekend, with somebody she knew from the teen chat echo.
“Who does he think he’s going out with?” said Gentian.
“Me,” said Juniper, coldly.
“Which one?”
“All,” said Juniper, slightly less coldly. “He guessed. That’s the only reason I’d even think about going out with him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Never you mind.”
“You’re going to have to tell me, at least,” said her mother.
“I know, but don’t tell them.”
Rosemary’s not a Giant Ant, thought Gentian, and giggled. Juniper glared at her.
“What about telling me?” said their father.
Juniper considered him. “Okay, but you can’t speechify.”
“I certainly can. I speechify very well indeed.”
Rosemary and Gentian laughed. Juniper said between her teeth, “You may not speechify.”
“I think it’s pretty likely, in fact,” said their mother.
“Why?” said their father. “Is he too old? Mad, bad, and dangerous to know?”
For some reason this question made Juniper, who had shown every sign of bursting into temper, smile demurely.
“I’ll try to rein in his propensity to lecture,” said their mother, “but I think he’ll have to be in on the secret.”
“I’m glad I’m the youngest,” said Rosemary.
“Why?” said their mother.
“Because if I ever go on a date they’ll be too old to care.”
After dinner Juniper went off to research a history paper at the library with Sarah, and Gentian asked for permission to use the computer in Juniper’s room.
“You should have asked before your sister left,” said her mother, who seemed to be in rather a sour mood. “If she’s got anything obviously private sitting out, don’t look at it, and don’t sit on the bed if she’s got a pattern laid out, all right?”
“It’s not fair the computer should be in her room.”
“It’s there because she has two rooms; there’s no space for it elsewhere.”
“It’s not fair she should have two rooms.”
“Rosemary likes to be snug and you need to be high enough for your telescope.”
Gentian considered pointing out that when the present room allotment had been made, she had been five years old and had not had a telescope, but she decided not to press the issue.
Junip
er’s diary was where it always was, not left sitting out. Her bed was covered with rejected clothing; most of it was clean, and she had just put it on, exclaimed in horror, and taken it off again. She was not usually quite so picky about what she wore to go to the library with Sarah, so she must be hoping to encounter some boy or other there. Maybe Denny; maybe the person from the chat echo. She wondered if Juniper had found out what he looked like before agreeing to meet him. She wondered if she herself would do the same.
Gentian held Juniper’s diary in her hand for a moment and then stuffed it unopened back into the chair cover. She could look at it later if what she wanted to know was not in the messages on the chat group. She would rather, if it were possible, deduce the identity of Juniper’s date from available evidence. She removed a stack of old newspapers from the chair and sat down cautiously at the computer. As a scientist she should be comfortable with such devices, should view them as extensions of herself, tendrils of her own mind reaching out to the universe. That was how she felt about the telescope.
But the computers at school were too battered and cranky, and this one, while intended for all the children of the family, was too much Juniper’s. Gentian, fingers poised above the keys, thought about trying to use her father’s computer instead. Somehow she felt that Juniper would know if her sister read her chat groups from her own machine. This was irrational. Besides, her father was in his office, using his computer and listening to Laurie Anderson sing about angels.
Gentian sighed and logged on. She called the BBS so seldom that every time she came back her account had expired. For this occasion she called herself Laurie March and used “Scrabble” as her password.
Within five messages she remembered why she didn’t do this more often. Nobody could spell, punctuate, or write a sentence longer than five words unless they did it by leaving out the period and sailing gaily on to the next five-word sentence.
And they flirted, with an ineptitude so profound that Gentian, who found the whole process despicable and tried to know nothing about it, could not help recognizing it. At least when Steph or Alma flirted, you might initially think they were just having a conversation with somebody who happened to be male, until you thought twice, or Becky pointed out that Steph had a special voice for flirting and Alma always put her hand on the arm of the object of her affections. Gentian was sorely tempted to send several pairs of these flirters private mail with advice in it, especially the ones who said they wanted “intelligent females” and demonstrated the intelligence of a large rock.