by PAMELA DEAN
On November 14 was the conjunction of Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter at 6:15 in the morning. Gentian got up for it in spite of the weather forecast. The windowpanes were wet, and when she pulled up the shade and turned her lamp on so it would shine outside, she saw flakes of snow turning in the gray air like dust motes. The house next door was dark and there was no snow on its roof. They must have installed something to heat the roof and make the snow melt. Or maybe it was just poorly insulated. That would figure. You would never be able to do astronomy from the top of that house; and now that they were heating it, her own astronomy would probably suffer from the wavering air created by that warmth.
Gentian pulled the shade down and sat on the edge of the bed. Maria Mitchell, who had curled up in the warm spot Gentian left when she got up, set up a steady purring, just in case Gentian should not have noticed that there was a cat within petting distance. Gentian rubbed her under the chin and wished she could run away to an observatory, as children used to run away to join the circus.
Since she was up, she took a bath, aided by Maria Mitchell, who sat precariously on the edge of the tub and made occasional swipes at her hair. When she was a kitten, Murr had fallen into the bath water about once a week, but she never did now.
Gentian got dressed, went halfway downstairs, came back and fed Murr, who was sitting on the damp bathroom rug looking quizzical, and went downstairs again. She put the kettle on for tea and went into the living room, where one light was on. Her father never got up early voluntarily, but sometimes he had insomnia and would get up and read for a while and then sleep until noon. The light was the one over his armchair, but the person in it was Rosemary, in a tattered white T-shirt and pink leggings, her fair hair fetchingly tangled over her brow. When Gentian stepped on the creaky board, Rosemary jumped and dropped her book.
“What’s the matter?” said Gentian.
“Nothing, only you scared me.”
“No, I mean what are you doing up?”
“I’m studying for my badge.”
“I thought you had to do things, not study.”
“You have to do things and study. What are you doing up?”
“Guess.”
“Well, astronomy, only you knew it was going to be cloudy.”
“Sometimes they lie.”
“Genny.”
“What?”
“Do you talk to Dominic a lot?”
“No, hardly ever.”
“Is he going to come build a time machine in our attic?”
“Are we going to build a time machine in our attic with him. I don’t know, but every time I give up on him he says something about it.”
“I think he’s a drug dealer.”
“You what?”
“Well, I do. He doesn’t go to school and he’s walking around really late at night and he talked to me about drugs.”
Gentian sank down onto the sofa. “When?”
“Last week when I was coming home from Girl Scouts.” “Rosemary. Did he offer to sell you something?”
“Well, no.”
“Or give you something?”
“He didn’t say he’d give me anything, but he talked about dull opiates and nepenthe.”
Gentian started to laugh and stopped hastily; if Rosemary got affronted she would never say another word. “Rosie, I think he was just quoting poetry. He does that a lot. Did he say anything about hemlock?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Okay, look, I think that’s Keats.” She got her father’s battered paperback of Volume II of The Norton Anthology of English Literature from the shelf beside the fireplace and found “Ode to a Nightingale” in it. “See, here. ‘As if of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains. ’ Is that what he said?” “I remember the drains; I thought it was weird for a drug dealer to talk about drains.”
“I don’t think he’s a drug dealer. He’s maybe not all there.”
“But what about the nepenthe?”
“That’s in Bulfinch’s Mythology. It means something that’ll make you forget all your cares. It is a drug, but it’s in the Odyssey; people don’t sell it on the street. It’s a mythological allusion.”
“Okay,” said Rosemary dubiously, and then in a rush, “I was so worried!”
“Rosie, if you really think people are trying to sell you drugs on the street you should tell Mom and Dad.”
“But then they wouldn’t let him build the time machine and you and Junie would be mad.”
“We don’t want drug dealers building time machines in our attic, Rosie, honest. Or murderers or burglars either, so if you think he’s any of those, just say so and we won’t let him, all right?”
“You’re so weird about boys,” said Rosemary.
“Well, we aren’t that weird.”
“I think Junie is.”
“Well, you shouldn’t indulge her in it.”
“Oh.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Um. He said rosemary is for remembrance, which I already know, and he said I had laid soft pillows under his head, which I didn’t, they were under his butt, he sat on them, and anyway there was only one.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“Yes, and he said the very hairs of my head were numbered. So I said I had to go in, and I did.”
“Do you like him?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t throw rocks.”
“Well, that’s something.”
The kettle whistled, and Gentian went to make her tea. When Erin and Gentian arrived at the Planetarium, the doors were shut and locked, and there was a sign on them that said, “Closed for repairs.”
“Boneheads,” said Erin. “The recording didn’t say anything about that.”
“Well, let’s go into the library, anyway.”
When they had exhausted the charms of the library, they had to find fabric for Gentian’s jumper. They wandered through the fabric store, fingering everything and concocting fabulous costumes. “This’d make a cloak—really weird leggings—a broomstick skirt—a pair of particolored hose—a smoking jacket.” They separated gradually, Gentian heading for the cottons and Erin going to look for buttons.
“Genny,” called Erin, “come look at this.”
Gentian crossed the store to her. She had a roll of fabric from the sale table. It was dazzling white, with a fluid drape and a look, too, like water.
“It’s silk,” said Erin. “It’s cheaper than some of those cottons. We could make your blouse out of it. We could make something dashing and piratical that you could wear with jeans, too.”
“I’ve never sewn with silk,” said Gentian, fingering it. “I’d be scared to cut it.”
“It’s on sale,” said Erin. “I’ll cut it. If I mess up I’ll buy you enough muslin for a shirt.”
“Why is it on sale?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see any stains. Maybe everybody was afraid to cut it.”
“Well,” said Gentian, “far be it from me to refuse an adventure.”
“You want to watch that tendency,” said Erin as they went to find somebody to cut a length of the fabric for them. “What if it had been polka-dotted?”
“The tendency?”
“The fabric, you Becky.”
“Polka-dot fabric isn’t an adventure, it’s a misadventure.”
“I don’t believe that addresses my point,” said Erin, as austerely as only she could. They both laughed, but Gentian knew an answer was also required.
“I choose my friends wisely,” she said, “and they don’t offer me polka dots.”
“Never?” said Erin.
“Well, hardly ever.”
“My point exactly.”
They had come to the counter, and handed the bolt over to a young woman who was sorting ribbons.
“Three yards, please,” said Erin.
When they had paid for the cloth and were walking to their bus stop, Gentian said, “If you’re trying to warn me about somethi
ng, I wish you’d just come out and say it.”
“Be careful how you choose your friends,” said Erin, with a very slight curl of her lip.
Gentian, stung because she knew that Erin thought she was obtuse, said sharply, “Which friend?”
“Just watch out for polka dots,” said Erin. “That’s all I have to say.”
Gentian caught herself sulking on the bus, and made herself stop it. In the first place Erin would take no notice whatsoever, and in the second Becky wouldn’t like it, and in the third it was a special trick of Juniper’s and she did not want to emulate it. She exerted herself to talk to Erin, and finally remembered that Alma had told her Steph had a Plan, to be revealed around Thanksgiving, and that she had promised to alert the troops.
“Oh, what now?” said Erin, and they had a comfortable talk about Steph and how they liked her so much but found her so exasperating.
The snow had stopped when they got off the bus. The sky was still gray, but everything glittered subtly. The air felt colder than it had while the snow was coming down. The snowy outlines of tree and roof and traffic sign looked set, as though they might endure until spring.
Gentian and Erin hurried inside and set to sewing. Gentian had never had a silk shirt before, but she liked the way the material felt. They had cut out the pattern and put the larger pieces together when the sun came out.
“Let’s go outside,” said Erin, standing up. “We’ve spent the morning in a cave and the afternoon in a sweatshop.”
All the snow was gone from the treeless lawn next door, and from the roof of the house.
“Is that where Dominic lives?” said Erin.
“Yes.”
“Poor him.”
“Yes, isn’t it an awful house?”
They ambled around the back yard, took turns pushing one another in the tire swing, and admired the lines of snow, like brushstrokes of white paint, along the windward side of every tree trunk.
“Has Steph talked to you?” said Erin.
“Not really. I mean, I see her at school and we say hello and commiserate about school stuff, but I’ve been kind of avoiding talking to her privately. I’m afraid she wants to sermonize at me about the seance. I do ask her about her Plan once a week or so so she won’t think I’m mad at her.”
“She thinks we called something awful into your house and we have to get it out again.”
“And just what does her church have to say about that?”
“Not much, I’d think. Methodists, right?”
“So she’s being superstitious rather than religious?”
“There’s a difference?”
“Well, not from where I stand, or you either.” Erin was an agnostic; Gentian was an atheist. “But—I guess I think of stuff like astrology as superstition rather than as religion. And going off the deep end like this about a ouija board, when she and Alma spent an hour telling me that only fundamentalists believe that things like that, or tarot, or whatever, work at all, let alone that they’re of the Devil—if that’s not superstition, what is it?” “Fright, I’d say,” said Erin.
“Do you think it was anything except us?”
“No,” said Erin, “but is it any more superstitious to talk about our collective unconscious’s actually moving a planchette than it is to say we called up an evil spirit?”
“I see what you mean—but yes, it is more superstitious to talk about calling up an evil spirit, because it didn’t feel evil.”
“It did to Steph.”
“But not to Alma, and she’s really more religious than Steph is.”
“Yes, I know, that’s weird.”
Gentian remembered her conversation on the porch with Dominic. She looked towards his house, and the back door opened and he came out. He was hatless, in a billowy white shirt and black trousers, with a black leather jacket slung over his shoulders. The wind blew his hair back. He came across his lawn and across the driveway and across Gentian’s back yard, without calling or waving, but making straight for them.
When he got there, he didn’t speak; he did look at Gentian.
“Erin,” said Gentian, “this is Dominic Hardy. Dominic, this is my friend Erin Kerr.”
Neither of them acknowledged the introduction.
Erin stood looking at Dominic, her hands in the pockets of her pink denim jacket, the tail of her oversized blue T-shirt hanging down to where the knees of her jeans would have been before she cut them out with Steph’s pinking shears, her nice cap of straight brown hair unruffled in the light autumn breeze. She never slouched. Steph, who still sometimes did, accused her of secretly walking about all night with the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary on her head. “It would explain the circles under your eyes,” she said.
Uncannily, Dominic looked with interest at Erin’s sharp face and said, “You’ve been burning the midnight oil again, I see,” as if he had known her for years and meant something secretly embarrassing by the term, “burning.”
Gentian gazed at him. He had never spoken to her or her sisters like that.
Erin didn’t like it. She took two or three casual steps backward, as though she found the crack in the driveway uncomfortable to stand on, and looked at Gentian.
“We’ve been sewing,” Gentian said to Dominic.
“Cambric shirts?” said Dominic.
“What is cambric?” said Erin, to Gentian. “I keep forgetting to look it up.”
“Shirts with milk in them?” said Gentian.
Erin laughed. “That does make me think it might be muslin or something else thin and white or off-white, just like tea that’s mostly milk. Let’s go look it up.”
Gentian had contemplated asking Dominic in for cocoa, but Erin didn’t want her to. Why didn’t he ever come out when she was by herself?
Dominic said to Erin, “Make me a cambric shirt, without any seams or needlework.”
It was his riddle-voice. Erin said, “In some songs, it’s a shirt of nettles.”
“Ms. Scattergood says you can make cloth of nettles,” said Gentian, “though I don’t know why you’d want to.”
“Someone might ask you to,” said Dominic. He was still looking at Erin, but he flicked the end of his glance at Gentian, rather as Junie, mixing dough, would check to see that she had remembered to get the eggs out. Would averted vision show him what sort of a double they were? When nobody said anything, he looked at the ground.
Erin shifted her feet. “Well—”
Gentian was profoundly reluctant to end this encounter. She might not see Dominic again until spring. She had almost given up on the science project.
“Well,” said Erin, “it’s getting cold.”
Dominic put a hand to the collar of his leather jacket. Oh, save it for Steph, thought Gentian. She was more lightly dressed than Erin was. It was in fact the imagined sensation of that jacket, warm from Dominic, settling over her back and shoulders that made her say, “And we still have to do all the handwork. We’d better go in.”
She was afraid, for a moment, that Dominic would offer to help them. Then she hoped he would—it would put the rudeness on his side, and he looked as if he might even be good at sewing.
But he only stepped back from Erin, very much as she had stepped back from him, and produced a gesture somewhere between a nod and a bow.
It made Gentian weak in the knees, but Erin said coolly, “Nice to have met you,” and walked towards the back door.
Gentian looked at Dominic. She wanted to blame Erin. Sorry I can’t ask you in, but she’s my guest. Sorry she was rude. Sorry you won’t look at me like that.
“Don’t be a stranger,” she said, and before the phrase was out of her mouth she cringed at it.
Dominic looked as if he had never heard anything like it.
“Oh, I’m not,” he said. “You know me.” He gave her a little bow, much more like a bow than the gesture he had made for Erin, and strode back to his mean red house.
Gentian watched him, a dark, upright figu
re against the brilliant green of his lawn, the vile red of his house. He put his hand on the handle of the back door. Let him be locked out, she thought. She could hear the small click of the latch over the sound of the wind. He opened the door and went in. The door snicked shut behind him. The cold wind rose in the old maple tree, gathered its last few yellow leaves, and with a sudden lunge drove them past Gentian and down the driveway. Behind them the air on her neck was bitter. A sifting of snow slid down inside the collar of her sweater. Winter had come.
Gentian went back inside and shut the door. The warm, untidy red-and-white kitchen shocked her like the blast of hot air that came out of the oven when it was set at 450 degrees for piecrust. Erin was sitting at the table. She had taken off her pink jacket and laid it on top of the scattered sheets of the Sunday paper. Pounce was curled up on it, looking smug.
Erin said, “How long has he lived here?”
Forever, thought Gentian. “Since September,” she said. She took the glass saucepan out of the dishwasher, examined it narrowly for stray corn kernels or bits of onion, and thumped it down onto the right front burner.
“Good thing he doesn’t go to school,” said Erin.
Gentian got the milk out of the refrigerator, considered measuring it, shrugged, and poured it into the saucepan until the level looked right. “Well, not to our school.”
“That’s what I meant. He can depredate some private school all he wants. I'm just glad he’s not near Steph.”
So am I, thought Gentian. She opened the corner cupboard and took out the glass canister of cocoa and sugar, mixed with great ceremony by her father every Halloween. She supposed she really ought to measure this part, but since she didn’t know how much milk she had, it hardly seemed sensible. She was doing this all backwards, anyway: you were supposed to put the sugar and cocoa into the pan with a little water, mix it smooth, and boil it for one minute. Then you put in the milk.
“Has anybody besides Alma met him?” said Erin. She was accustomed to saying almost everything in a pleasant and unemphatic tone, but now she spoke austerely in a manner usually reserved for adults and television.
“No, not yet,” said Gentian. She found the copper saucepan with the ounce markings where Rosemary always wrongly put it, amongst the measuring cups, and spooned the cocoa mixture into it. “You’re the second,” she added. She should have put the water in first. She got out a metal measuring cup and ran a quarter cup of water into it.