Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

by PAMELA DEAN

  And it sounded like a lot of lawn mowers,

  Mowing down my lawn.”

  Becky burst into delighted laughter. Gentian liked the song because it had the speed of light and the speed of sound in it, mixed in with more common elements of poetry, and it made her feel that she and the singer were members of the same human race, rather than the usual human race everybody was always blathering about.

  Becky looked almost herself at the end of that. The fifth song began, “I don’t know about your brain, but mine is really bossy,” and that made her laugh too.

  The next song was the one Gentian had brought the record for. It was called “Beautiful Red Dress.” Becky got up at the line, “Cause the moon is full and look out baby, I’m at high tide” and went over and turned the sound up and remained standing in the middle of her braided rug for the rest of the song, looking blank and almost altogether absent, as though she had no sense left but hearing. When it was over, she punched the skip button so that it played again. She played it five times before she let it go on to the song about the devil.

  Gentian thought of pausing that song, since it was perfectly obvious that Becky was not going to listen to it, but she decided that she might as well have something to listen to while Becky was cogitating.

  “The day the devil comes to getcha

  He’s got a smile like a scar.

  He knows the way to your house.

  He’s got the keys to your car.

  And when he sells you his sportcoat

  You say: Funny! That’s my size...

  Give me back my innocence.

  Get me a brand new suit.

  Give back my innocence.

  Oh Lord! Cut me down to size.”

  Gentian giggled; it was so deliciously ironic. Becky didn’t move. The Devil song went on, and ended; the next one began.

  “Hansel and Gretel are alive and well

  And they’re living in Berlin.”

  Gentian should have liked this song, but it always irritated her. She got up and paused the disk.

  “Think of something else I’d be good at,” said Becky as Gentian passed her on her way back. “I’m giving up poetry.”

  Gentian looked at her. The last poet who had made her say that was Emily Dickinson, and the one before that was Tolkien. She did not altogether see how Laurie Anderson fit into this progression. “Songs are different,” she said.

  “But that’s the kind of thing I want to do,” said Becky. She reflected. “Well, one of them.”

  “What is?”

  “That song. It’s got images that add up to something and it’s funny and it’s serious and it’s snarky and it’s about important things.”

  “Well, so does your stuff.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Well, you’re just starting out.”

  “I’ll never be able to do anything like that.”

  “Well, you’ll do something different that’s just as good, then.”

  Becky shook her head mournfully and climbed into bed, where she sat staring into space. Gentian sighed and started the CD player again. She might as well enjoy the rest of the record. Becky had not had an attack of the Poetics like this for some time. Gentian got her telescope book out of the suitcase and sat reading it and listening to the music. She tried to think of an astronomer who would make her think, “I’ll never be able to do anything like that.” Certainly she was unlikely to do the equivalent of inventing differential calculus or a new kind of telescope, but she was perfectly confident about being able to find interesting things and have insights about them.

  “I think I’m obsessed,” said Becky suddenly.

  Gentian put the book down. “With what?”

  “Whom.”

  “Micky?”

  Becky nodded. She looked miserable. “I keep thinking how much more fun the Giant Ants’ party would be if he were there too.”

  “Good grief.”

  “And it probably wouldn’t. I know he doesn’t appreciate Steph and he thinks Alma’s weird for not having any black friends.”

  “And what does he think of Erin?”

  “He thinks she’s cool.”

  “That’s something.”

  There was a pause. Becky chewed on the end of one braid, which she had not done since she was eight. I won’t ask, thought Gentian; then she thought, if I can’t ask, what’s the point of anything; then she thought, but it’s all right for some things to remain unsaid; and finally she thought, but this is what’s wrong.

  “And what does he think of me?” She tried not to sound aggressive or demanding.

  “He knows you’re my best friend,” said Becky, “so he doesn’t express an opinion.”

  “But?”

  “He thinks we’re cliquish and snobbish and unwelcoming.”

  “We’re not a social club, for God’s sake.”

  “He says most of us would like to have other friends too but you won’t let us.”

  “How did you get onto this from scientists and the philosophy of vegetarianism?”

  “Oh, we didn’t. We talked on the phone another time.”

  “And,” said Gentian, exasperated beyond prudence, “I’d like to see me not let you guys do anything you wanted to do. It’s like herding cats. And it was Alma’s idea to be a group and have a name. And what’s wrong with it anyway? Is my family cliquish and snobbish and unwelcoming because we don’t ask all the neighbors to move in with us? And everybody has other friends. You have the Tesseract crew and Steph’s got Glee Club and Alma’s got soccer.”

  “What about Erin?”

  “Erin is solitary.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m an astronomer.”

  Becky grinned briefly but said nothing.

  “Do you agree with him?”

  “No, I think he exaggerates and simplifies, like Mr. Rothman says you have to do to draw a caricature.”

  “But you think there’s an underlying truth?” said Gentian, going on with their art teacher’s definition. “You recognize the resemblance?”

  “I don’t know,” said Becky. “I’m confused and I don’t like it.” They sat gloomily while the last Laurie Anderson song on the disk ran out. It was an odd amalgam of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and other bits and pieces, including a chorus about how they were going to hang some new stars in the heavens tonight, and Gentian had meant to bring it to Becky’s attention. Instead she found herself saying suddenly, “You know, even if he thinks all those things about us, why did he say them to you?”

  “We agreed we’d be honest with each other.”

  “What? Just like that? With somebody you just started talking to?”

  “We didn’t agree we’d tell each other everything,” snapped Becky. “Just that what we did say would be the truth.”

  “I don’t think that explains it.”

  “I’m not sure it does either,” said Becky. “It’s awfully strange. I don’t know if I’m not suited for any other acquaintance because I’ve been in the Giant Ants so long, or if there’s something odd about him. I get paranoid, I find myself wondering if he’s been mad at us for years for some reason and he just put up this front of wanting to get to know me and have an honest relationship right from the beginning so he could tell me what he thought of us.”

  “What did we ever do to him?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s obviously thought about us a lot.”

  “That’s spooky.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. There are a lot of us and we’re often kind of loud. Is it spooky when Laurie sees the March girls haaing fun and thinks about how nice it looks?”

  “Everything in Little Women is spooky,” said Gentian, automatically applying the insult of the moment to that despised work.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. It is not.”

  “All right, no, you’re right. It’s soppy, but it’s not spooky.”

  “So maybe Micky’s being soppy too.”

  “No, he isn’t,
because he doesn’t approve of us.”

  “Well, he isn’t being soppy in the same way as Laurie, certainly.”

  There was a meditative silence. Gentian thought of Dominic.

  She had used the same word about Micky as Alma had used about Dominic. She considered telling Becky something about all that. But it’s different, she thought, Dominic and I don’t have a relationship, I’d never say “we” about Dominic and me, there isn’t any such entity. Thinking “Dominic and me” even while denying the validity of such a construction made her feel a profound pleasure.

  “Read to me from the history of the telescope,” said Becky. “Read me something really, really technical. I think it will be soothing.”

  Gentian picked up the book again and found an early chapter detailing the nature of armillary spheres, quadrants, the torquetum, and the astrolabe. These descriptions were intertwined with remarks on the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system and the refinements made to it, which Gentian found considerably more complicated than Newtonian theory; she trusted Becky would too. She read on through the advent of Tycho Brahe, who thought a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter had precipitated the great plague of 1563 and who caused to be built a nineteen-foot quadrant, the better to observe future conjunctions. Not satisfied with this, he added transversals. He finally built an equatorial armillary, meanwhile rejecting the Copernican theory for an earth-centered one in which the other planets revolved around the sun, which revolved around the earth. Less by this theory than by his fiery disposition, he made enemies among the Danish nobles so that eventually his income was curtailed and his observatory fell into ruin.

  Gentian cleared her throat.

  “Read another chapter, please,” said Becky.

  Gentian read to her about the history of optics. She had to stop near the end of the chapter because her throat was so dry.

  “I’m sorry,” said Becky, “I’ll get the repast.”

  She went downstairs and came back with a large insulated jug of grape juice and a tin of samosas and another of date-and-almond bars. Her mother, besides making patchwork, was a splendiferous cook. Gentian wondered why she couldn’t combine these domestic virtues with a different disposition. It was odd. Junie was a good cook, and she was irritable and opinionated too.

  “Do you want the rest of the chapter?” she said when Becky had rejoined her on the bed and she had drunk a glass of juice.

  “I don’t know. How soon do we get to Galileo?”

  “That’s the next chapter.”

  “Maybe later, then.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Yeah, it did.”

  “What do you want to do now?”

  “Let’s play Scrabble.”

  “Where’s the OED?”

  “We can use the Shorter Oxford for now; I don’t feel like messing with the magnifying glass.”

  They sat in the middle of the rag rug with the board and the dictionary between them, playing Wide-Open Scrabble, which allowed proper names, archaic terms, hyphenated compounds, trade names, and all manner of slang. Alma had refused to play the ordinary kind of Scrabble ever since she discovered that the official dictionary did not contain the terms “sixte” and “carte,” from fencing, and she had rapidly addicted the rest of the Giant Ants to the new version.

  Alma and Steph were cutthroat players, much engaged with triple word scores and piling words atop other words and filling the board tightly. Erin liked finding elegant solutions. Becky and Gentian liked making interesting words. Becky’s triumph this evening was “Timbuktoo,” and Gentian’s was “Hertzsprung.” She did get a triple word score on that one, and won the game.

  They finished the samosas and took the cookies to bed with them, and lay crunching cookies and reading in a desultory and interruptable fashion.

  “I forgot to tell you,” said Gentian. “Mom is trying to persuade Juniper and Rosemary that they would rather come to our party than go trick-or-treating in the cold.”

  “Rosie might, but I can’t imagine that Junie would give us the time of day.”

  “She might enjoy sneering.”

  “Good luck to her,” said Becky. “I think we’re a match for her. We had to have Eileen one year, remember, the year before she got married, and she was much more supercilious than Junie.”

  This led to a series of reminiscences about all the Giant Ants’ past Halloween parties. Gentian thought of suggesting that Becky write a poem about them, but decided it might be too soon. They trailed off into sleep at about five in the morning.

  Chapter 10

  Early Sunday afternoon Gentian hurried home in the cold, lugged her suitcase upstairs, dumped it on the bed, petted her cat, and ran downstairs again to see if her father had remembered to take her party list to the grocery store. Sitting on the kitchen table was a brown paper bag labeled “Genny” in big green letters. Investigation showed that he had probably forgotten to bring the actual list but remembered almost everything on it. The omissions were unfortunate: both salted nut rolls and peppermint creams were traditional items, and it was especially necessary to have the nut rolls because Steph was allergic to chocolate.

  Gentian hunted her mother down in the basement, where she was patching a hole in the floor; extracted a ten-dollar bill from her; and ran up the stairs and out the side door.

  It was bright, still, and icy out. Gentian blinked a few times, turned to go down the driveway, and saw Dominic standing at the bottom of it. He had his back to her. He was not dressed for the weather any more than he ever had been. He was all in black. Gentian stood stock still, clutching her father’s string grocery bag. She could not just walk up behind him, and she didn’t think she could speak. She had just decided to go back into the house and come out the front door, so that he might hear her and so that in any case she would be approaching him from the side, when he turned around.

  “Hello,” called Gentian, hurrying down the driveway.

  “A damnable doughnut, that,” said Dominic, amiably.

  Another riddle, lovely. “Happy Halloween,” said Gentian.

  “When graveyards yawn, and hell breathes forth contagion to this world?”

  “My mother says it’s the Time of Masks, and we like it that way.”

  “What path do you follow, then?”

  Gentian was not sure what he was asking, but in case it should be mystical, she said firmly, “I’m a scientist.”

  “We murder to dissect,” said Dominic.

  Gentian suppressed a mad urge to ask him if he were a vegetarian, and said, “I have to go to the store, and I’m in a hurry, but you could walk along with me if you like.”

  The moment she said it she felt her entire face go hot. And what if he asked her what she was buying the candy for? She couldn’t ask him to the party, not when she didn’t want Micky. Besides, she would have to check with everybody first. She couldn’t help foisting her sisters off on them, but Dominic was an avoidable evil.

  She added, “We could talk about your time machine. Is it a school project? When is it due?”

  Dominic fell into step beside her as she turned away from him in the direction of the little corner store. “Time,” he said gravely, “is the school in which I learn. I am my own school.”

  Gentian’s parents had considered home-schooling, until they found out about the open school. She wasn’t sure that was what Dominic meant, and in any case it was a side issue. “When do you need to start?” she said.

  “The beauty of a time machine is that it renders time irrelevant,” said Dominic.

  His tone was still amiable, but Gentian felt thoroughly snubbed. She was glad that the store was only two blocks away. She scuffed through the fallen leaves, thinking of the color temperatures of stars and wishing Dominic were inside one of them, preferably a Type O.

  He walked beside her serenely, as far as she could tell from looking at him through her hair, which she had not had time to brush back or secure with its usual headband. She thought of asking his advice
about her Halloween costume, but that came too close to talking about the party, and anyway he might snub her again. She contented herself with looking at him, since he was gazing far ahead and a little upwards, as if he were either thinking deeply or hoping to see a flock of exotic birds. He had an exceedingly pure, pale profile; even the sharp wind did not make his cheeks red. His lips, as her father said, were red as wine. His hair is like a raven’s wing, thought Gentian, and then had to stifle a snort. She had never seen a raven’s wing. Hair like a grackle’s wing, she thought, and snickered; hair like a pigeon’s behind, she thought, and giggled.

  Dominic immediately gave her a courteous-looking attention.

  “Sorry,” said Gentian. “I was just woolgathering.”

  “And can you tell which is the upper and which the under end of your wool?”

  “No,” said Gentian, cheerfully.

  He shook his head a little and said nothing further. They came to the store. Gentian went in first, to avoid awkwardness should he try to open the door for her. She collected her candy and an extra carton of heavy cream, just in case they wanted to whip it and put it in their cocoa, and had paid for all of this before she realized Dominic had not come in with her. When she came out, he was standing on the sidewalk examining a crabapple tree and being scolded by a crow. Gentian decided not to look at the crow’s wing.

  He turned as the door of the store banged, and came up to her. “It’s not a day to be within doors,” he said.

  “It feels like a lovely one to spend by a nice fire to me,” said Gentian.

  “I have fire with me,” said Dominic.

  “I guess you do, if you walk around without a coat in this weather.”

  They crossed the street at the light and walked down the first of the two blocks back to their own. They were going briskly, but the silence felt much heavier to Gentian.

  “Do you knit?” she asked him desperately. “Is that why you asked me about telling the wool?”

  “No,” said Dominic. “I don’t knit. I unravel.”

  “Oh, like Penelope?”

  Dominic laughed. Gentian jumped; it was the most uneXpected sound she could remember hearing in her entire life. She had said what she did because everything in Bulfinch’s Mythology was still rattling around in her head. She had not thought it would produce a reaction from him, any more than most of the other things she said. You never knew what would make an impression on Dominic. Maybe she should read more mythology.