by PAMELA DEAN
“He also says that the Greeks and Romans didn’t have the information we have ‘from the pages of Scripture. ’”
Becky gurgled. “Well, I’m sure he thought of it that way.”
“‘Information, ’” said Gentian. “As if it were a scientific text.”
“You don’t laugh at Jane Austen for thinking Sunday traveling a very serious problem.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember if it’s Emma or Mansfield Park. Frank Churchill or Henry Crawford. I think it must be Mansfield Park. It feels like Fanny.”
“Yes, I remember now. It’s Fanny worrying about Henry Crawford.”
“You don’t laugh at that, do you?”
“But that’s Fanny thinking just what Fanny would think,” said Gentian.
“Well, isn’t the introduction to Bulfinch’s Mythology Bulfinch thinking just what Bulfinch would think?”
Becky was prone to these disconcerting dissections. Gentian, struggling with a profound feeling that the difference was perfectly obvious and Becky just refused to see it, was suddenly reminded of her conversation in the porch swing with Rosemary. She said, “Yes, I guess, but—Fanny’s just worrying. Bulfinch is laying down the law.”
“Would Jane Austen have read Bulfinch?”
“I don’t know,” said Gentian, who had difficulty attaching dates even to the history of astronomy; she knew the order in which things had happened, but could never relate any of the things to any other event, at least not reliably. She knew Maria Mitchell had helped with navigational mathematics for sailing ships, of course, but not when sailing ships had gone out. Jane Austen had no astronomical information at all to anchor her in time.
Becky went for the biographical dictionary again. “Nope,” she said. “She died in 1817 and Age of Fable wasn’t published until 1855.”
“Why did you want to know?”
“I just wondered what she’d have had to say about his tone of voice, that’s all.”
“Something snarky,” said Gentian.
“Well, probably.”
“Even if she was religious.”
“So what else about Bulfinch?”
“He quotes a lot,” said Gentian. “Like Dominic.”
“Who?”
Oh, good grief, thought Gentian. She had forgotten about meeting Dominic. No, it wasn’t that at all; she had absorbed his existence somehow, so that she assumed everybody knew about him. Or, maybe, she didn’t want anybody to know about him. But it was unconscionable to keep things like this from Becky.
“Dominic’s the boy next door,” she said. “He came over to return the snake his mother borrowed—” Becky laughed, and Gentian acknowledged it by casting her eyes at the ceiling, “—and I tried to make fudge but I burned it, and he quoted the whole time.”
“You tried to make fudge?”
“Junie wasn’t home.”
“You wouldn’t even make fudge for Steph’s birthday.”
“Well, I didn’t make it for him, either. I burned it and Junie had to make another batch, and then he left without eating any.”
“Was Junie much enamored?”
“Probably; she always is. But listen, so was Rosie.”
“Rosie came out?”
“Just so.”
“What did he quote?”
“Heinlein. Shakespeare. That dumb poem about Euclid. Keats—our sonnet. A lot of things I didn’t recognize but I could tell they were quotations because they didn’t make normal sense otherwise.”
“Did you like him?”
“I don’t know,” said Gentian, slowly. “He was interesting.”
“So’s a rattlesnake,” said Becky.
“I don’t think he’s a rattlesnake, but he might be kind of clueless.”
“Better leave him to Junie.”
“He might not be enamored even if she is.”
“Did he seem to be?”
“I couldn’t tell. He just quoted.”
“Is that the big news of the week, then?”
“I guess it is,” said Gentian. She added, with no idea of whether she was telling the truth or not, “The problem with the telescope kind of pushed it out of my head.”
“You aren’t yourself when you can’t do astronomy,” said Becky, nodding. She sat forward suddenly. “Wait—didn’t you use to do stargazing with binoculars?”
“Sure, to learn my way around the sky before we spent a lot of money on a telescope.”
“Have you still got them?”
“Sure.”
“We should check and see if they work, too. And if they do, maybe you could use them until we figure out what’s wrong with the telescope.”
“That’s an idea. It’s not the best time of year for it; I’d have to go outside. But it would be better than nothing. If it ever stops raining.”
“We’ll check periodically,” said Becky. “Did Dominic say anything about seeing you again?”
“You make it sound as if we’d had a date,” said Gentian, irritably. She took a deep breath. “He said something about having us help him with a project of his, a science project, and no, it is not astronomy, and I wouldn’t do it if it were.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I’m not exactly certain. Something to do with time, maybe relativity.” It was odd: she and her sisters had not laughed at the thought of a time machine, but she shied from mentioning it to Becky.
“Who’s us?”
“All three of us.”
“That’ll be a treat,” said Becky.
“Such a nice way to get to know your neighbors, dear,” said Gentian.
Becky chortled. “Well, let me know what it’s all about,” she said.
“When I find out. Were you going to read me some of your poetry?”
Becky propped herself up on Gentian’s pillows and read to her. The first poem was called “Clowns and Puppets.” She had taken its theme from a quotation that Gentian’s father had had pasted above his computer for some years: “I will not be the toy of irresponsible events.” Her father said it was from a comedy, but Becky’s poem was very serious, except for the puns. She punned on “be” and “bee,” on “pawn” and “pun” and “upon,” on “responsible” and “responsive,” if that was a pun. The poem was about being helpless, or maybe about refusing to be helpless even when you couldn’t do anything about the universe.
The second poem was called “Both Your Houses.” Gentian did not understand it, but she loved it. It was full of bright leaves, cold winds, swords, stars, and defiance.
The third one was called “The Butterfly Hat,” and it was about the day Becky took Micky’s butterfly net away from him. The octave was accurate, but in the sestet she said she had put the butterfly net over his head and his hair had all come out in butterflies that stuck themselves onto his scalp with little pins, as though he were a card to display them on. It was gruesome and cheerful.
The last one was called “On the Snow in April.” Becky read it with particular care.
“It’s enough to make one turn to pagan rites,
Burn incense with sly purpose, promise anything,
To bring to these obediently shortening nights
Some herald of the obstinate spring.
Dear Heaven, has it not been cold long enough?
Remember that the regular is beautiful.
Things stretched past their due time are not the stuff
Of loveliness, and all chaos is dull.
What shivering sad time is this for Easter?
There are not even natural miracles.
Is it that through this gaunt delay there pulls
The gleeful string of that essential jester?
They say, let spring bring Christ to mind; this year,
Christ must persuade there will be violets here.”
Gentian was floored. She tried not to be. As she herself had gone to Alma’s church for a year to see if the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork, Becky had gone to Steph�
��s church for six months to see what poetic roots were in the Christian religion.
Becky’s father was, he said, an unobservant Jew, a phrase that continued to delight the Giant Ants disproportionately long after it had been explained to them; her mother was, she herself said, a recovering Mormon, a phrase that also delighted the Ants but less enormously; neither of them, despite a distaste for the religions they had been born into, had anything good to say about Christianity either. Erin said that in a broad sense, a worldwide, cultural sense, all three religions had a lot in common and it wasn’t surprising that anybody who wanted to reject one utterly would toss out the other two as well. Becky said her father’s attitude was not utter rejection but rather the kind of “Who, me?” attitude you see in a cat you are trying to get to come indoors at evening. Her mother, now, was utterly rejecting.
Becky had come back from her six churchly months in a depressed state. “It’s like sexism,” she said. “It’s just everywhere.” Becky was looking at her now. Gentian said, “I wish you hadn’t. You make C. S. Lewis sound right.”
C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography, had said that when he was an atheist, he had been troubled by the perception that the best authors were either Christian or, if they were too early for that, anticipated Christian views. “Christians are wrong,” he had said, “but all the rest are bores.”
“I know it’s the best one, technically,” said Becky, in a discouraged tone, “but that’s because I’ve been picking at it longer and polishing it up longer.”
“When did you write it?”
“Spring before last.”
“And you wrote all the others just this week?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Oh.”
“My one comfort,” said Becky, “is that I sent it to a lot of religious magazines and they all rejected it. They said they wanted something more uplifting.”
“You sent it out?”
“I had to.”
“You could put it in Tesseract.”
“I’d never live it down.”
“Read it to me again,” said Gentian.
Becky obliged her.
“It’s really kind of creepy,” said Gentian. “I mean, if there were a God you’d like it to have a sense of humor, but you don’t really want it to be the sort who plays practical jokes. It would make you wonder if you were one.”
“It’s been suggested,” said Becky, grimly.
“I like the ending,” said Gentian. “I don’t think that’s very religious. Well, it’s not very typical, I mean. Demanding that Christ persuade you of anything. You think that’s what the magazines didn’t like?”
“I hope so,” said Becky.
“Anyway,” said Gentian, “all the rest aren’t bores. I like ‘The Butterfly Hat’ best and I think ‘Both Your Houses’ is extremely cool.”
“What about ‘Clowns and Puppets’?”
Gentian considered. “I like it,” she said, “but I might like it even if it weren’t very good, because I know what you mean.”
Becky groaned. “Typical adolescent angst, you mean?”
“We’re allowed,” said Gentian.
“Yes, but it’s so boring.”
“Having your poems makes it less boring.”
Becky laughed. “You’re supposed to say they make it all worthwhile.”
“I suppose that’s what Steph says.”
“Yep.”
“Steph doesn’t understand the meaning of degrees.”
“She does mean it, though.”
“I know,” said Gentian, nettled. The thought of Steph was making her particularly twitchy just at the moment. “Look,” she said, “don’t tell the rest of them about Dominic, okay?”
“You mean don’t tell Steph.”
“Yes, I do, but that’s easier if we just don’t tell anybody.”
Becky looked dubious. She drew her knees up under the long skirt, folded her arms on them, rested her chin on her arms, and looked at Gentian. “I don’t know,” she said, in the muffled tone this posture created.
“You do understand why I don’t want to tell Steph?”
“Yes, but I don’t like having secrets from everybody. We used to be much more a group; now we’re pairing off.”
“An odd number of people can’t pair off.”
“Well, we are. Erin just varies who she pairs with.” Becky sighed gustily. “Maybe it’s because we’re teenagers and we’re evolving our romantic instincts for later.”
“I want mine to devolve, thank you,” said Gentian, more or less automatically. She ate the rest of the corn chips.
“But when’s the last time you did something just with Erin?”
Gentian said, “I thought you didn’t want us to pair off?”
“Not exclusively.”
Gentian found this inconsistent, but it was easier to answer the question and see what argument Becky was trying to develop.
“It has been a while,” she conceded.
“Didn’t you guys use to sew a lot?”
“Yes, but then Eileen got divorced and moved back in with the baby and we couldn’t use their basement any more.”
“Couldn’t you do it over here?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t mean you have to sew,” said Becky. “It’s just that I think maintaining all sorts of contact is important.”
“All sorts of—?”
“All directions.” Becky considered this. “All variations. All possible combinations.”
“You gonna make Alma and Erin go to a movie together?”
“Some things,” said Becky, “are beyond even my passion for togetherness.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Gentian got out the next set of sandwiches, and they ate several. Gentian thought about “The Butterfly Hat” with growing delight, and finally asked, “Have you talked to Micky any more?”
“Just in passing,” said Becky. “I was thinking of showing him the poem. I figure if he can take that, he’s definitely worth going to a movie with. But then I wonder if it’s really fair. Maybe he’d take it better from somebody who had been civil enough to go to a movie with him first.”
“I don’t think your affections can be very much engaged,” said Gentian, borrowing a phrase her mother had used on Junie when Junie was about ten and had a terrible crush on Kenneth Branagh. “I mean, you sound like me. Calculating,” she explained, borrowing a term her father had used about her when she was first deciding whether to have Becky or a now-vanished Jessica Lindholm as her best friend.
“I’m trying to be sensible before the hormones strike.”
Gentian looked at her with some alarm. The only person whom she had watched the hormones strike was Junie, and Junie had never been sensible since the day she was born.
“It’s such a silly arrangement,” she said.
“That essential Jester,” said Becky, sourly.
“Let him try it and see how he likes it, that’s all.”
“Well, the Christians say he did.”
“He tried being a man. Big deal.”
“So it does make a difference?”
“I never said it didn’t,” said Gentian between her teeth. “I said it never makes the kind of difference they say it does. And they ignore the real differences. They don’t test drugs on women as well as men, and they don’t build bigger restrooms for women even though we take longer, and they don’t pay any attention to real differences unless they want an excuse to tell us we can’t do something.”
“Hormones strike boys, too,” said Becky, thoughtfully.
This meant that she did not concede the point but could not think of an argument, or perhaps simply didn’t want to bother. Gentian leaned over and turned on the weather radio.
“At midnight in the Twin Cities, we have clear skies and forty-one degrees, with a southeast wind at five to ten miles per hour.”
“That was fast,” said Gentian. She could still hear the rain dripping. She bounced off the be
d, stepped over Maria Mitchell, and peered out the window. Yes, it was clear in that direction, but it might start raining again. It would be easier to try the binoculars than to worry about opening and closing the telescope dome.
She got the binoculars in their battered case from the very back of her closet, with some unnecessary assistance from Maria Mitchell, whose obligations as a cat included jumping up onto the shelf as soon as Gentian had removed her suitcase from it, and also sniffing and rubbing her face on every other item on the shelf.
They went out into the hallway, discouraging Maria Mitchell from accompanying them. She insisted on leaving the bedroom, but then ran into the bathroom and jumped into the tub. Gentian tossed her a ping-pong ball, and they went quickly past the two small doors that led into storage space under the eaves. Just beyond these, ending the hall, was a short wide door with a padlock. Gentian unlocked the lock and pulled the door open. In this damp weather, it stuck; it also, of course, creaked. Gentian felt around on the left and found the light switch and shoved it upward. It was an old, thick, heavy switch that made a click as though it were turning on the power for some large, complicated, 1930s factory. The light produced this way was anticlimactic: one forty-watt bulb high in the roof went on, dustily.
Gentian led Becky along the broad dusty boards in the middle of the unfinished attic. There were two finished rooms up here, somewhat lost in the corners. Rosemary had lived in one for several months when she was angry with her entire family. Gentian could never have done it. Her own room was cozy; this part of the attic was cavernous. It was here that they would have to help Dominic build his time machine, supposing he had meant a word he said. They would need a lot more lights.
At the very front of the house was another short wide door with a padlock on it. Gentian unlocked this one too, and dragged it open. A huge breath of night came in. Gentian ushered Becky out onto the little balcony, and wrenched the door shut again. The balcony floor was covered in shingles, which gave it the impression of being a misplaced piece of roof. It had a decorative railing of wrought iron, already dry after the rain. This structure had been reinforced by Gentian’s father a few years ago with a network of two-by-fours that Mrs. Zimmerman had pronounced adequate and safe, but was mercifully hard to see in the dark.
The lounge chair Gentian had used was still folded up against the wall, but it would be wet and possibly mildewed. She took the binoculars from the case, looped the strap around her neck, and leaned her elbows on the two-by-four.