by PAMELA DEAN
“Yeah, well, Jeremy gave them to me when I had the green shoes, and he gets fractious if I don’t wear them sometimes.”
“Well, if it’s Jeremy.”
Becky’s little brother was everything Gentian’s sisters were not. “I had the weirdest conversation with Rosie,” said Gentian, reminded.
Becky looked receptive. Gentian hauled out the corn chips. “I can’t tell you details, I promised. But it was weird. She might turn into somebody.”
“What else happened this week?”
Gentian thought. The earlier part of the week seemed infinitely far away. “You go first,” she said. “My brain’s not very collected.”
“Telescope withdrawal,” said Becky. She ate a corn chip. “Well, I wrote four sonnets, but I don’t think they’re much good. You can see them later. Steph made me go for a walk and listen to her quarterly lecture about the way I dress.”
“She’s early,” said Gentian.
“It’s because she’s worried about you. She thinks I’m a bad example.”
“Yeah, right,” said Gentian. Steph’s preoccupation with wearing just exactly the right cool clothes and Becky’s with never wearing matching colors seemed, on one level, exactly the same kind of thing to her; she could not imagine taking so much trouble over one’s appearance. She liked Becky’s trouble better because it was revolutionary, but it was still trouble.
She did wonder what Dominic liked girls to wear, but because it seemed likely to involve something black and slinky, she wasn’t going to waste a lot of time fretting over it. She looked thoughtfully at Becky. “What exactly is she worried about? That the Cool People will laugh at me? That I’ll never have a boyfriend?”
“Both.”
“Well, I’d feel I was doing something wrong if the Cool People didn’t laugh at me, and you can’t captivate anybody if you feel like an idiot, which I would if I dressed the way Steph thinks I should.”
“Steph knows that,” said Becky, “but she doesn’t understand it.”
“She keeps thinking that I’ll hit some magical age when I agree with everything she wants,” said Gentian. She added thoughtfully, “She’s just like most people’s mothers.”
“Mine, certainly,” said Becky, and ate another corn chip with a gloomy gesture.
Gentian crammed her own mouth with a stray quarter-sandwich. She could hardly imagine a better daughter than Becky, and Becky’s mother’s obvious dissatisfaction in the matter made Gentian want to spit. She swallowed and said, “And what’s so tragic about not having a boyfriend, anyway?”
“Don’t preach to the choir,” said Becky.
“Are you going to a movie with Micky?”
“Even if I am, it’s not to avoid the tragedy of my single life.” She ate another corn chip. “What’s single about it, anyway? I’ve got difficult parents and a really great brother and the Giant Ants and three pen-pals and Tesseract. And the whole inside of my head. I’m about as single as an acorn on a hundred-year-old oak.”
“But more singular,” said Gentian.
“Yes,” said Becky. “There’s always that.”
“How can Steph be so smart and so conventional?”
“Protective coloration,” said Becky. “To protect her from her family.”
“Morons.”
“No, let’s save that for Junie’s chat buddies. Boneheads, that’s what I think Steph’s family is.” She paused. “Are. They are bone-heads. Steph’s family is boneheaded. Steph’s family is composed of boneheads.”
Gentian laughed. But while an evening with Becky would never be complete without an excursion into language, dividing stupidity into finer and finer shades was depressing. She cast about for another topic of conversation. What had she been doing, anyway? Not astronomy: not only had she been unable to use the telescope, she had not done her reading, her research. All that homework, Julius Caesar, all full of astrology instead. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Becky’s study group wasn’t reading Julius Caesar. They had gotten Romeo and Juliet. Gentian wouldn’t have liked that any better, but some of her group would. The rest of the kids who would have liked Romeo and Juliet were stuck with A Comedy of Errors. Gentian suspected malice aforethought on the part of their teacher, who was far too astute for comfort.
“Speaking of boneheads, how’s Romeo and Juliet?” she said.
Becky smiled. “I got Mercutio.”
“Your hooouuusssess,” carolled Gentian, imitating an unfortunate senior production of the play that they had been made to see when they were in sixth grade.
“Micky remembers that, too,” said Becky. “But I beat him to the part.”
“Are you doing it that way?”
“No, certainly not. I was afraid he would, though.”
“How are you doing it?”
“Like Erin,” said Becky.
Gentian was momentarily nonplussed; then she understood. “The onlooker,” she said.
“Who sees most of the game,” said Becky.
“For all the good it did him,” said Gentian.
“That’s because he was careless in dangerous times,” said Becky. Her round face looked austere, not a usual expression.
Gentian considered this remark. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “He was just being a little—a little fantastical, just having fun. And covering up how bad he felt by being silly. Just like lots of people.”
“Yes, but it’s not safe,” said Becky. “Not if you’re in Shakespeare, anyway.”
“Well, sometimes it is. It depends on the play, doesn’t it?”
“No, it’s never safe. Sometimes it turns out all right, but it’s never safe.”
Becky had taken a course in Shakespeare’s comedies last summer, at the university, which had been having a program for junior-high students—presumably, Gentian’s father said, because they were alarmed by the quality of the freshmen they were admitting and wanted to get at the local population before the high schools ruined it. Gentian had thought of taking the course too, but she had never found Shakespeare’s comedies very funny, and summer was the prime stargazing season. She was therefore ill-equipped for argument.
“What if you’re not in Shakespeare?” she said.
“Well, then it would depend, wouldn’t it?”
“On what, then?”
“On how dangerous the times were,” said Becky, patiently. “I’m not sure people can tell. I think they get used to whatever’s going on.”
“Well, maybe up to a point. But being used to it means taking a lot of precautions, it doesn’t mean taking a lot of unnecessary risks.”
“Maybe it depends on your temperament.”
“Mercutio’s got that, sure enough.”
“Is that why he’s named that?”
“Oh,” said Becky, looking delighted. “I never thought. I’ll ask in class next week, shall I?”
“Sure. Nobody makes fun of his name, though, the way they do of Tibault’s.”
“The way he does of Tibault’s,” said Becky.
“Why do I always like the play better when I talk to you than I do when I see it?”
“I have no idea. I can’t believe you hated the Zeffirelli.”
“It was gooey.”
“What romantic stuff do you like, for pity’s sake?”
Gentian looked at her carefully. That was a Stephian question, but Becky seemed quite earnest. “It probably hasn’t been invented yet,” said Gentian.
Becky, to her relief, laughed. Then she said, “Weren’t any great woman astronomers romantic?”
“There’s such a lot to choose from,” said Gentian, dryly. “Caroline Herschel wasn’t either.”
“Poets have a wider range of role models,” said Becky.
So you did pay attention to those biographies, thought Gentian. She said, “I think you should emulate Emily Dickinson and put your stuff in the teapot for posterity.”
Becky lunged at her, laugh
ing, and upset the bag of corn chips onto the floor. Gentian defended herself with her Hmong pillow for some seconds, but was eventually pinned by Becky, who was twenty pounds heavier than she, and tickled until she cried, “I give, I give! She did not put her poems in the teapot, that’s a vile patriarchal lie,” which made Becky laugh so much that Gentian was able to squirm away from her and thump her on the head with the pillow.
“We’d better stop,” said Becky, “Maria Mitchell is eating all the corn chips.”
“Leave her the broken bits. Let’s pick the rest up and have some reading.”
Becky stepped over the crunching Maria Mitchell and rummaged in her bag of books. Gentian, shaking cat hair from the corn chips and laying them on a convenient issue of Sky and Telescope, in case Becky should be having a fastidious day, hoped it would be either Becky’s own poetry or prose.
“I found this just for you,” said Becky, sitting down on the bed again, in her hands a book whose edges bristled with scraps of paper marking everything in it she had found worthy of mention. She opened it to the only purple scrap, and read aloud.
“His heatless room the watcher of the skies
Nightly inhabits when the night is clear;
Propping his mattress on the turning sphere,
Saturn his rings or Jupiter his bars
He follows, or the fleeing moons of Mars,
Til from his ticking lens they disappear....
Whereat he sighs, and yawns, and on his ear
The busy chirp of Earth remotely jars.
Peace at the void’s heart through the wordless night,
A lamb cropping the awful grasses, grazed;
Earthward the trouble lies, where strikes his light
At dawn industrious Man, and unamazed
Goes forth to plow, flinging a ribald stone
At all endeavour alien to his own.”
“Who’s that?”
“Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
“Really! I thought she only did gushy stuff.”
Becky sighed.
“The last one you read me was all full of roses.”
“That doesn’t mean it was gushy.”
“All right, all right, it wasn’t gushy the way you mean it. But it was romantic.”
“Undeniably.”
“I like this one a lot. I like ‘earthward the trouble lies. ’ Can I have a copy?”
She could tell that Becky saw right through this transparent attempt to placate her; but since Gentian really did want a copy of the poem and Becky really was pleased, she was in fact placated. Gentian said, before the argument should start again, “What else have you got?”
“That sonnet,” said Becky, “is from a whole set of them called ‘Epitaph for the Race of Man. ’ They’re mostly pretty grim.”
“Are you going to read me all of them?”
“No. I just thought you should know.”
“All right, now I do.”
“Now, you read me something.”
“I’ll read you a little bit,” said Gentian, “but then I’ll show you something.”
“Without the telescope?”
“Yes; for heaven’s sake.” She pulled her history of the telescope out of the nightstand drawer. It fell open to the passage she wanted.
“My brother began his series of sweeps [Caroline wrote] when the instrument was yet in a very unfinished state, and my feelings were not very comfortable when every moment I was alarmed by a crack or fall, knowing him to be elevated fifteen feet or more on a temporary crossbeam instead of a safe gallery. The ladders had not even their braces at the bottom; and one night, in a very high wind, he had hardly touched the ground before the whole apparatus came down.”
“That’s Caroline Herschel?”
“Yes. And so is this.” She turned back a few pages and held the book out; they leaned their heads together over it. The drawing of Caroline Herschel, in black and white, showed a woman leaning on a pillow, regarding the viewer with a steady and not very encouraging gaze. She wore a sort of knitted cap with white fringe; a ruff under her chin like those you could see in illustrations of Elizabethan dress; a shiny-looking dark dress that was probably satin but reminded Gentian, partly because of its lines of stitching, of an aviator’s leather jacket; and a pair of spectacles around her neck on a strap. She had big eyes, a long nose, and a straight mouth. Gentian had never been able to decide if she was thinking of the eight comets she had discovered or of how her back hurt her.
“Wow,” said Becky. “Now that’s a face.”
“But listen to this,” said Gentian. She read the caption aloud. “Of this drawing, which shows Caroline Herschel in 1847 at the age of ninety-seven, her friend Miss Beckedorff wrote that it does not ‘do justice to her intelligent countenance; the features are too strong, not feminine enough, and the expression too fierce. ’”
Becky snorted.
“Daddy says Caroline Herschel’s in one of those historical novels he reads.”
“Are you going to read it?”
“No; he says she doesn’t actually show up, she’s just mentioned as helping the hero with making his telescope, and the hero’s wife is jealous of her, even though she’s sixty at the time.”
Becky snorted again, more lengthily.
“No, it was cool,” said Gentian. She considered. “Well, Dad thought it was cool. Because the writer knew that she was a real astronomer and really interested in making telescopes, not just her brother’s housekeeper.”
“No, I meant about being sixty.”
“Caroline Herschel was sixty, not the hero’s wife.”
“Whichever.”
“Well, all right,” said Gentian. “The reason she didn’t need to be jealous was that Caroline Herschel was just interested in the telescopes, not in the hero.”
“That’s the most reasonable thing to be jealous about,” said Becky.
“Telescopes?” said Gentian, who very rarely got to tease Becky about saying something ambiguous.
Becky rolled her eyes, shook a corn chip carefully, and ate it.
“What, though?”
“Shared obsessions. Like telescopes. I think telescopes are interesting and I like astronomy, but I don’t feel about it the way you do.”
“No, you feel that way about poetry.”
“Right. But I might feel a little strange if you met somebody who was just as interested in astronomy as you are.” Becky tapped another corn chip on the magazine and ate it whole.
Gentian sat still. “But I don’t want to,” she said at last.
“I wondered why you never joined the Astronomy Club at school,” said Becky. “Or read the astronomy groups on Fidonet or the Internet. Or anything.”
“It’s private,” said Gentian. “I don’t want to talk to anybody else about it. Except you.”
“Well, it’s going to be a little difficult to study it that way, you know.”
“But don’t you feel that way about poetry?” Gentian remembered, suddenly, finding out that Micky had written for Tesseract and her alarm that Becky might take up with another poet.
Becky shook her head. “I don’t show it to people I think won’t get it, but I’d love to find more people who do get it. I like the Tesseract crew, even if some of them are clueless. They understand what it’s like to have written a poem.”
Gentian took a corn chip and put it into her mouth, not because she wanted it but to give herself an excuse for not saying anything. Having chewed, she said slowly, “But you don’t all write the same kind of poetry, and you don’t write it for the same reasons. Does anybody write it for the same reasons you do?”
“No, nobody I’ve met.”
“Well, I don’t think anybody else does astronomy for the reason I do it, and I don’t want to talk to other astronomers, because they’ll ask. Do the people in Tesseract ask you why you write poems?”
“No,” said Becky, and grinned. “They assume that I write poems for the same reasons that they write poems, and I just
keep quiet.”
Gentian immediately felt better. “I don’t want to have to worry about it,” she said.
“I don’t worry; it amuses me. But I can see that you would.”
“So,” said Gentian, “you don’t have to worry that I’ll meet somebody who cares as much about astronomy as I do, because I’d run in the opposite direction, fast. But if you met somebody who wrote poetry for the same reason you do, then what?”
“Well,” said Becky, wrinkling her brow. “It’s not the same thing. I’d like to find somebody like that, but we wouldn’t be writing poetry together like you might be doing astronomy with somebody else.” She considered for a moment. “Unless we collaborated on an epic poem.”
“You don’t write epic poetry.”
“I know, that’s why it’d have to be a collaboration.”
Gentian shook a corn chip briefly and ate it slowly. She could tell that Becky was still thinking, and in time Becky said, “Do you remember when Steph was so taken with Mary Beth Jenkins?”
Gentian did. “Fourth grade.” Mary Beth Jenkins, who had moved to Arizona the summer after sixth grade, had been a lot like Steph: extremely pretty, almost aggressively ordinary in her interests and her clothes, a straight-A student and a good soccer player, much given to pronouncements about what was ladylike.
“Well,” said Becky, “we weathered that.”
Gentian regarded her dubiously. She could not see that Steph’s delight in discussing feminine frippery with a regimented-games type was comparable to Becky’s delight if she ever found a fellow poet or Gentian’s if she ever found a fellow astronomer whom she cared to talk to, but Becky’s tone had had a certain finality in it that Gentian did not feel up to contesting.
She contented herself with saying, “Well, yes—we did weather that.”
“What are you reading this week?” said Becky.
Gentian thought. It was hard to recall this week at all. “Homework, mostly, I guess,” she said. “Oh, and Bulfinch’s Mythology.”
“How is it?”
“Mmmm, I’m not sure. The introduction was awfully funny.”
“Funny?”
“It starts out, ‘The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. ’”
“Well, he didn’t know there’d be neo-Pagans.”