by PAMELA DEAN
“No, oh no,” said Dominic. “And yet I am faithful, in my fashion.”
They had reached the foot of their shared driveway, and Gentian was thankful. Sustaining any kind of interaction with Dominic was wearing. One reason having him at the party would have been pleasant was that all four of the other Ants could have helped her elicit reactions, including, she was very sure, some she could not discover on her own if she talked to Dominic until Doomsday. But it would be more relaxing without him.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve got a lot to do. It was nice to see you. Let me know when you want to get started on the time machine. We’ll have to do a little work in the attic first.”
“The whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” said Dominic, quite as though he were making some commonplace farewell; and he went up the driveway and into his house and shut the door.
Gentian collected herself and went up her own front steps. The Halloween battle was still raging inside. Gentian fled to her room, sat down with her cat in her lap, and applied herself to the problem of her own costume. “I could go as you,” she said to Murr. “A double disguise—a cat named for a famous astronomer.” She had been the astronomer Maria Mitchell when she was in the fourth grade, and had decided that that was the only Victorian person she would ever be in her life. The clothes were terribly heavy and cumbersome, and that year Halloween had been warm.
She could certainly go as a cat. Rosemary, who tended to be aggressively ordinary in her Halloween plans, possibly in rebellion against her older sisters, had been a pumpkin complete with orange face paint one year, and a black cat with stiffly wired plush tail the next; and Rosemary never threw anything away. The face paint might be dried up, though.
“I could be an angel with a lawn mower, but nobody’d get it except Daddy and Becky. I could have a beautiful red dress and go as menstruation. Yuck. I could go as a constellation.” She had in her youth dressed up as several different planets, but like the telescope costume these posed the problem that one could not easily sit down in them. “I could go as Elizabeth Bennet.” No, those clothes were almost as nasty as the Victorian ones. And the men’s clothes were worse, so Darcy was out as well.
“I really think, Murr,” she said, “that I’ll have to go as you.”
Erin arrived first. She took off her hooded red wool coat with the elephants embroidered on it and stood there in khakis and heavy boots. She had brushed her hair straight back, fastened it in a ponytail, and powdered it gray. She had a notebook under her arm.
“Stanley?” said Gentian, hanging up the coat. “Livingston?”
“Guess again,” said Erin.
“You guess me while I think.”
“Junie’s dressed up as the gingham dog and you’re going to eat each other up.”
“Half right.”
“Oh,” said Erin. She smiled. “Oh. Maria Mitchell. Oh, very nice.”
Gentian was pleased. “Margaret Mead?” she said.
“She often wore dresses in the field.”
“Is she closer than Stanley?”
“Well, you got the gender right.”
“Are the elephants on your coat a clue?”
“Distantly.”
The doorbell rang. Gentian opened the door and was faced with a distorted mirror image of her own costume—orange cat ears, whiskers, tail draped over the arm. This one had painted her face in tiger stripes and put on a tiger nose. She bounced suddenly forward, almost upsetting Gentian, thus revealing herself to be Alma. She was shivering. Gentian shut the door behind her and pointed her in the direction of the fireplace.
Alma went over in large bouncing steps. She had orange boots anyway, and she had put black stripes on them.
Erin laughed. “But whatever his weight in pounds, shillings and ounces, he always seems bigger because of his bounces.”
“I thought,” said Alma, turning her tiger nose in Gentian’s direction, “that I was the only one there was.”
“You are,” said Gentian. “I am an astronomer.”
Alma burst out laughing as only she could. The doorbell rang. Gentian opened the door again and was confronted by Steph with her dark hair frizzled all over her forehead and screwed up in back under a large straw hat. The rest of her was wearing what looked like a very full knee-length kimono over harem pants.
“Ah,” said Gentian. “Ms. Bloomer, I presume.”
“Ms. Bloomer did not live in this climate,” said Steph.
Gentian let her in, and she joined Tigger at the fire. They both began trying to guess who Erin was. Gentian went into the kitchen and brought out the tray of sandwiches.
“Ooh, all the things Tiggers like best,” said Alma.
“You know,” said Erin, “I almost came as Tonstant Weader.”
“Oh, so did I!” cried Steph. “I was going to be Dorothy Parker and Alma was going to be Edmund Wilson, and I was going to fwow up and she was going to say, ‘Oo, those awful Orcs, ’ over and over until you got the point. But she didn’t like the way he dressed, so we didn’t.”
“It wasn’t only that,” said Alma. “It was Dominic.”
Everybody looked at her.
“Gentian’s new next-door neighbor.”
Everybody looked at Gentian.
“Alma’s probably had more conversation with him than I have,” said Gentian. “He’s very elusive, but he did come out and play soccer with us after we made my red jumper.”
“Yes, but who is he?” said Erin. “And how did he make you dress up as Tigger?”
The doorbell rang. Gentian got up and answered it. Becky was standing on the porch, almost unrecognizable because she was dressed all in white, in a kind of caftanlike garment that looked as if it had started life as a sheet. No, it wasn’t all white, it had lines and circles of black on it.
It had writing on it.
“Come in, for heaven’s sake, so I can read you,” said Gentian. Becky was cold too; she came in readily, and stood next to the radiator under the hanging lamp so Gentian could examine her costume. Gentian read, “And I replied to her in these words: ‘Go with a light heart, and with memories of me, for you know how we cherished you.”
“No, start farther up,” said Becky, “on the left shoulder.”
Gentian backed up a little and started over.
“It seems to start in the middle—”
“Yes,” said Becky. She stretched the sheet a little flatter. It read:
“and honestly I want to die”
—so sobbing, many times, she left me
and she said this [to me]:
“My god! what awful things are happening to us;
Sappho, I swear I am leaving you against my will.”
And I replied to her in these words:
“Go with a light heart, and with memories
of me, for you know how we cherished you.
And if not, then I want to
remind you
At which point there was a rent in the white cloth, so that the black leotard Becky wore underneath showed through, instead of black words.
“What’s that for?” said Gentian, touching the edge of the rip with her finger.
“It’s a lacuna,” said Becky.
There was another rip at the beginning of the next line, and then:
and we had good times
For ma[ny] garlands of violets
and roses [another rip] together
and [ ] you put on beside me
And many garlands
woven from flowers about your soft neck
[ ] fashioned
And with m[uch] myrrh
from rich flowers [ ]
and royal you rubbed your skin
And on soft beds
tender [ ]
you would satisfy desire [ ]
And there was no [ ] nothing
holy nor [ ]
from which [we] kept away
No grove [ ]
[ ]sound
This was followed by a long series of t
atters.
They were all gathered around Becky by now, reading aloud and murmuring and exclaiming. Becky was looking at Gentian.
“That’s horrible,” said Gentian. “It just seems to disappear; it looks as if somebody had ripped bits out of it in a fury.”
“They probably didn’t,” said Becky, “the manuscript was just awfully old. But it makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Then she looked over Gentian’s shoulder at Erin and cried, “Erin! You’re Jane Goodall!”
“A touch, I do confess it,” said Erin gravely, but anybody could tell she was pleased.
“It’s the ponytail that does it,” said Becky. “I don’t think your face is much like hers, but the ponytail and the khakis really work. And your posture.”
“She’s the only reason I grew my hair this summer,” said Erin. “I’m getting it cut on Monday.”
Then they all milled about admiring one another and letting Becky guess Alma and Steph, which she did easily. Gentian stood back from the crowd a little, smiling to herself and waiting. Her mother came in with a pot of hot cider and a little spirit lamp to keep it warm, and some pumpkin cookies that Juniper had made. She was followed shortly by Juniper herself, in her disheveled-Hamlet costume. She did have a cloak over one shoulder, and in addition she had put on a beige leotard and tights under her costume, which would not only help keep her warm but allowed her to have her doublet, left over from a college production of her father’s, well unbraced, and her stockings truly down around her ankles. She had tucked her long red hair up under a black beret. She looked more imperious than mad, more like somebody who had become disarranged while riding than somebody who had rent her garments in despair. Possibly this was how she interpreted Hamlet’s character.
After her came Rosemary, in a red, white, and blue warm-up suit and a serious case of the sulks. They were each carrying one of the big canvas bags that their father used for groceries.
Gentian felt a sudden lightening of the spirits. Her sisters were going trick-or-treating. She could be with the family of her heart, with the ones she had chosen.
There was a brief mingling of both families, as Becky quickly made it clear that Rosemary was perfectly recognizable as a famous gymnast, and everybody else took up the pretence. Juniper spoke briefly to Steph, whose influence on Gentian she had often wished loudly were greater, and to Alma, probably because she still had a weakness for the Pooh books. Both her sisters departed in a flurry of admonitions from Gentian’s mother, who then put on a jacket, took a space heater under one arm and a huge sack of candy under the other, and went to sit on the porch, where Gentian’s father was already handing out lollipops to the younger applicants.
The Giant Ants had the use of the house for the next two hours.
“Isn’t it kind of cold for your parents to sit on the porch?” said Steph.
“They sat on the porch during the Halloween blizzard,” said Gentian, piling candy into bowls.
“Well, they were younger then.”
“Well, we were younger then. I think they were just the same.”
“Your dad’s getting gray in his hair.”
“Fine, that means he’s old enough to make his own choices.”
Steph desisted, biting her lip. Gentian was sorry she had been snappish. She tried to think of a peacemaking remark—“I got you salted nut rolls,” or “That’s a great hat”—but the first seemed self-serving and the second was so blatantly unlike her that Steph would almost certainly answer sarcastically.
“Really, they like it,” she said. “You can try to talk them out of it if you want, though. We can use my room for the party. I cleaned it up in case we wanted to keep going late.”
Alma put her arm through Steph’s. “C’mon, let’s go try. Gentian’s dad is cute.”
They went outside and shut the front door.
Becky said to Gentian, “I thought you didn’t like T. S. Eliot?”
“I don’t,” said Gentian, at a loss.
“But then what—oh. Oh! Oh, unfair, you know we agreed never to repeat a costume. Oh, dear, it’s an awful visual pun.” Becky sat down in the nearest chair, creasing several lines of poetry into temporary lacunae, and giggled quietly to herself.
“I think Erin wins,” said Gentian, “because you’re the only one who guessed her.”
“Did anybody guess me?”
“Actually, no, I don’t think anybody did. I mean, I guess you’re a poem, but I don’t know whose.”
“It says so right in the poem, actually.”
“I’m not sure what constitutes winning, anyway,” said Erin. “Maybe doing something everybody can recognize shows more skill.”
“I don’t know if recognition has anything to do with it at all,” said Becky. “What about effort, or originality?”
“Have you got a prize?” said Erin to Gentian.
“Oh, gosh, no, I forgot all about it.” She had meant to go out one day during lunch hour and find something Antlike, but somehow she had never gotten around to it.
“Well, we’d better not have a competition, then.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The winner could be Queen for the Night and we could all do her bidding.”
“I think I’d rather not,” said Erin.
“Which, be Queen or do somebody’s bidding?”
“Either one.”
“Well, maybe I wouldn’t either, come to think of it.”
“I’d rather have something friendlier, I think,” said Erin, perching on the dining-room radiator. “We’re all a little porcupine-like lately.”
“It’s puberty, I suppose,” said Becky, gloomily.
Steph and Alma came back inside, shivering and giggling, and made for the fireplace. Gentian joined them, and put another log on the fire. Erin and Becky stayed in the dining room for a few moments, talking in low voices.
“Well,” said Steph, looking over her shoulder at Gentian, the firelight outlining her big hat, “you were right. We couldn’t budge them. Your mom recognized my costume, though.”
“She tried to get Junie to dress as Amelia Bloomer a couple of years ago, when Junie was a raging feminist and it made her feel guilty about her clothes.”
“Isn’t she a raging feminist now?” said Alma.
“Yes, but that was when she’d just started being one. Even Junie can’t rage all the time.”
“Was Amelia Bloomer a raging feminist?” said Steph, settling down on the hearth rug with her tunic, the infamous short skirt that had so upset the Victorians, spread all around her and reaching to her outstretched calves.
“I think she was more cheerful than raging,” said Gentian, trying to remember the biographies she had devoured in the fifth and sixth grades. “She was a suffragist, and she edited a feminist newspaper, and she delivered lectures, but she didn’t rage like Elizabeth Cady Stanton raged.”
“They all raged, though, as far as everybody else was concerned,” said Alma.
“Well, yes, I guess so,” said Steph. “The way I don’t care if something has a tablespoon of cocoa in it or is solid chocolate; it’s all chocolate to me. I bet feminism was all raging to them.”
Becky and Erin came into the living room. Erin sat in the large armchair and Becky folded herself down next to Gentian on the loveseat. They all looked at the fire. Pounce came out of the sunroom, stretching in all directions, walked around them several times as if he were choosing a Christmas tree, and got into Becky’s lap.
The silence felt peaceful and contented, but Gentian, as the host, was made twitchy by it. She wanted to leap up and make everybody eat something, or play a game, or listen to music. She wanted at least to start a scintillating conversation. She wriggled deeper into the cushions and kept quiet. If Steph or Alma got bored, they would suggest something to do.
The fire crackled.
“So,” said Steph, “tell us about this Dominic.”
“He lives next door,” said Gentian, “we almost never see him, or anybody else either; he came
out when Alma and I were shooting baskets with the soccer ball, and asked if we wanted to play soccer, so we did for a while, and then we walked Alma home.” What he had said to Alma was Alma’s story to tell if she wanted to, and what he had said to Gentian was nobody’s business.
“What’s he like?”
“Totally gorgeous,” said Alma, “and maybe a few fries short of a Happy Meal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gentian knows what I mean.”
Gentian looked at Alma, but with the Tigger makeup her face was unreadable. “He can’t really have a normal conversation,” she said cautiously. “Sometimes what he says doesn’t seem very connected.”
“Sounds like a lot of people I know,” said Steph, “including some of the ones in this room, sometimes. Maybe he’s shy. Tell us about the gorgeous part.”
“Oh, you know,” said Alma, “your basic haunted heroic vampire, all pale with black, black hair and a profile to die for. And he is not shy, he says what he thinks, you just don’t know why he should say it when he does.”
“Hasn’t Junie snapped him up yet?” said Steph.
“She hasn’t had a chance,” said Gentian. “Really, we just about never see him.”
“You could have asked him to the party.”
There was a chorus of groans; Steph said that about some boy every year. Gentian glanced at Becky, who had not groaned. Becky looked blank, which just meant she didn’t intend that anybody should think she had an opinion.
“Well, I did think about it,” said Gentian incautiously.
“Oh, oh, Gentian’s smitten!” cried Steph.
Denying that kind of accusation was futile. “I just thought we could all have a go at making his conversation make sense. But it wouldn’t be a Giant Ants Halloween party if we did that.”
“We could have a new kind of party another time,” said Steph. “We could all invite anybody we had our eye on.”
“You can have my share,” said Erin tranquilly.
“Don’t give me that, I’ve seen you talking to Brent.”