“Oh, thank God,” Pippi sighed. Her face relaxed. She reached into the pocket of her housecoat, took out a jade earring, and clipped it absently to one lobe.
“I’m dying,” Swanny repeated with less conviction.
“Not yet, darling.” Pippi smiled wryly. “Give it a few years.”
That night during cocktail hour, Pippi served her a martini. For thirteen years it had been a Shirley Temple; now it was a martini. Swanny imitated Pippi and ate the olive first.
“I hope Corona showed you how to use the LunaTamps.”
“There were instructions on the box.”
“I’m not paying her to hand you a box.” Pippi flipped the switch on the wall; a fire roared to life in the fireplace. She peeled the ermine stole from around her neck and draped it over the back of a chair. “Now, tell me, dear. Isn’t it glorious to be a woman? Don’t slouch.”
Swanny slurped gin from the lip of her glass. “I just wish you’d warned me.”
“I suppose you’ll be moody now, and wanting chocolate. Oh, the things you forget. But it’s just like a bicycle. It comes back.” Pippi tossed back the rest of her drink and shook herself another. Swanny observed, with some mild surprise, that her mother was already drunk. “Swanny, have I ever told you the difference between a first and second wife?”
“No.”
“The difference between a first wife and a second wife is that the first wife has fake jewelry and real orgasms. The second wife has real jewelry and fakes the orgasms!” Pippi let out a little shriek; her laughter rang against the vaulted ceiling. “You’ll be a first wife, of course. Nothing tawdry. But don’t worry. We’ll get you the real jewelry too.”
It was that night, for the first time, that Pippi explained what investing in Swanny’s future meant.
* * *
Pippi Dahlberg homeschooled her daughter Swan Lenore from the ages of thirteen to eighteen in a battery of courses that she herself designed. Some of the courses lasted a matter of weeks; others were ongoing over the entire five years. Regardless of their duration, the rigor and mental discipline demanded for each was considerably intimidating. Swanny was awakened each day, Monday through Friday, by Corona in the gray, pale hours of dawn and summoned to the “schoolroom,” a chilly glass annex at the back of the house that had once been called the solarium. Her mother was always there waiting, alert and bony and bejeweled, with a vial of espresso and an emery board. On wicker chairs, separated by a wicker tea table, the women faced each other in all kinds of weather. Wind howled in the cracks of the skylight panes; sodden leaves on the lawn gave way to muffling snow, and then to the moist buzzing stupor of spring. A chalkboard on wheels tilted near one wall, its green slate never completely erased. Ghosts of names and dates mingled with the vivid silhouettes of fresh verbs and adverbs. At the wicker table, Pippi branded each completed worksheet and test with a red rubber stamp bearing the family seal. The mimeographed papers left ink on Swanny’s hands.
The courses Pippi taught included Penmanship, Self-Defense, Table Manners, Nutrition, Reproductive Health, Portfolio Management, Elocution, Ballroom Dancing, Evening Wear, Gemstones of the World, Wills and Trusts, Home Surveillance, Decorating, Voice, The Hostess’s Role, Prenuptial Agreements, and Divorce. The lessons of the last two were woven into the fabric of all the others, and could be encapsulated in a single pithy phrase: Not without my signature you don’t.
“Say it for me,” Pippi instructed, scrutinizing Swanny over the leopard-print frames of her half-moon glasses.
“Not without my signature you don’t.”
“Oh, darling, no. Say it sweetly.”
In the beginning, Swanny was petulant and daydreamy, with runs in her stockings from the sharp rattan of the chair. She had a tendency to write test answers on her wrist, though Pippi caught her every time. She ate indiscriminately from the zenith of the food pyramid down to its basement, often while her mother lectured at the board, and she refused to acknowledge a difference between turquoise and lapis lazuli. Still, despite herself, she learned.
For Swanny, the sensation of learning was not unlike the sensation of getting yet another new tooth. It began as a subliminal irritation, the semiconscious knowledge of something in her head both unwanted and unnecessary, and soon began driving her to distraction. Her mother employed what she called the Socratic method, which consisted of coldly interrogating her daughter hour upon tedious hour with a series of enigmatic, hair-splitting, formally indistinguishable, nigh well unanswerable questions that tested her rote memorization and mind-reading abilities simultaneously. More than once, Swanny found her tongue dumb as a thumb in her mouth, or heard herself stuttering (as her mother said, “unattractively”) in rage. More than once, she retreated from lessons to join Corona in the kitchen, where she pitched in by thunking the cleaver into the fresh-skinned rabbit shanks.
And yet, far from extinguishing an interest in her studies, this anger kindled it. Swanny hated the diagrams of properly and improperly arranged silverware; she did not care about the eclectic array of newel posts in the Steelworth mansion. But she wanted more than anything to humiliate her mother. At night, in bed, she would kick her legs beneath the monogrammed linens, muttering scalding retorts to Pippi’s terse queries and disappointed sighs. Enveloped in the coral porcelain of the bubble bath, she stewed over her improper suppression of unaccented vowels. Depressing the keys of her klangflugel with errorless precision, she strove to sound whatever diabolical chord it would take to lift her mother’s eyes from the daily crossword. She and Corona took turns spitting in the espresso machine, and slapped discreet low-fives when Pippi broke a heel. But Swanny wasn’t satisfied. Sometimes she wondered if she ever would be.
One evening, after a daunting Language of Flowers exam followed by a wintry, interminable dinner conversation, Swanny slipped out of the house. It was a cloudy night in summer, with heat lightning flickering in the purple clouds like the neon lights of a celestial city. She squinted up into them, and wished, not for the first time, that her mother would send her away to boarding school somewhere cosmopolitan, because here she was so lonely she could scream. She knew all the risks of dormitory life, and she honestly didn’t care. She’d keep mousetraps in her jewelry box to ward off thieves. She’d wash her hair in lamp oil to keep the nits away. She finished her amontillado and threw the glass down the outside cellar stairs.
Swanny meandered unsteadily through the overgrown garden, assembling angry bouquets in her mind. The weeds beneath her feet were no goddamn use. She needed birdfoot deervetch for revenge. Monkshoods to murder the world. White carnations for disdain, lime blossoms to say fuck you. And snapdragons—don’t forget those, snapdragons, snapdragons, snapdragons.
She wandered beyond the garden’s edge, into the tall grasses that no one ever bothered to mow, and was surprised to see Corona, some distance away, standing on the barren patch where they’d filled the in-ground swimming pool. Corona was holding a lit match and dipping at the waist, and as Swanny got closer she could see she was lighting candles, several of them. Swanny was going to say something snide about witchcraft or exorcism when she noticed Corona was also crying.
Instead Swanny said, in a voice that sounded uncharacteristically meek even to her, “Are those for your son?”
“I didn’t see you there, gordita. Yes. For my son, and for your father.”
“My father?”
“They loved to swim in this pool. Don’t you remember?”
“My father wasn’t doing much swimming the times I can recall.” Swanny remembered almost nothing of her father, but she was loath to admit it. She scratched her toe in the dirt. It was strange how this one patch on their estate never grew much, when all around it the plants were riotous and flourishing.
“Your father treated Ignacio like a son. I come here to pay my respects.”
“The sentiment is well meant, I’m sure, but shouldn’t Mother be doing that?”
“Your father was smart. He stayed out of her
way. Now he’s gone, she returns the favor.” Corona set down the last candle. The little flames danced in the summer breeze. “You don’t remember him. It’s sad.”
Swanny snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. I am his daughter, after all. I remember how the doctors looked at me the day he died. The intensity of my grief frightened them.”
“That wasn’t what frightened them. It was your teeth. A little girl so small, with all her teeth come in.”
“They thought I was going to bite them?”
Corona dried her eyes on her apron. “No.”
“Were Mother and Father first cousins?”
“Why would you ask me that?”
Swanny rubbed her gum with one finger. “Mother says that’s why I have so many teeth—from inbreeding. I wondered if perhaps Mother and Father were first cousins, like President and Mrs. Roswell.”
“Oh, La Diabla,” Corona murmured softly.
“Corona, incest is imprudent, I’ll grant you, but it’s not criminal. You can’t blame a woman for seeking someone of her own class. Now, tell me, before they were married, did they have the same last name?”
Tiny raindrops darkened the earth around them. Corona frowned at one sputtering candle. “There are many things a child should not know.”
“Sometimes I think you take offense at my becoming an educated woman.”
The two of them began making their way back to the house. Corona’s step was heavy and slow. Swanny’s kitten heels sank into the moist earth.
“What she’s teaching you is no education. Where I grew up, we studied math and history, language and poetry. Maps of the world.”
“Say what we will about Mother, I hardly think she’s skimping on my lessons. By the time she’s through, I’ll know everything under the sun, twice over, whether I want to or not.”
“El tiempo da buen consejo.”
“Speak English. You know I can’t understand you.”
6
HOMECOMING
The HowLux is a fully loaded recreational vehicle: it boasts three sleeping berths, a built-in icebox, a macrozap oven, two ThinkTanks with unlimited connectivity for in-air chat and trading, a fold-down card table/ironing board, a Wash ’n’ Dry, a Port-a-John, and in-seat massage functions with three focus areas: Upper Back, Lumbar, and Adult. Customized for Osmond’s special needs, this one also features a ramp hatch (most have stairs) and entirely hand-operated steering, enabling him to manipulate the acceleration and brake with a pair of antique gold knobs that bear the likeness of stately gryphons.
“I don’t get how I can be in trouble,” mutters Ripple, sitting shotgun, “when I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Osmond pointedly adjusts the rearview mirror. Behind them, the HowLux’s main hold is a U-shaped space, lined with an oxblood leather banquette. The craft’s attendants, two janitors borrowed from the mansion’s disposal and maintenance staff, sit to one side, exchanging bemused glances. On the other, Abby kneels, naked except for the chamois toga Ripple hastily fashioned for her after boarding the craft. Her hands are pressed flat against the window. Steam clouds the glass between her fingers. The sound she’s making is otherworldly—a high-pitched keening emitted between clenched teeth. She’s looking back, though there’s nothing left to see. Night has swallowed the Island whole.
“What became of your clothes?” Osmond asks.
“I told you, I was hurt. We had to cut them off. Check out my arm. She totally played doctor on me back there, you should thank her.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
Abby rocks back and forth, clutching at her bony elbows. A foam packing peanut falls from her hair. Her keening stops. Then, all at once, she vomits yellow bile onto the leather seat. She tries to wipe it up with her bare hands, but succeeds only in smearing it. One of the janitors flicks a switch on the wall. With a faint whirring sound, a brass-plated Sorcerer’s Apprentice scoots out from a cubby near the floor, diodes flashing. Abby shrieks, scrambling backward as it sweeps up the side of the banquette to shampoo the upholstery. She pulls her chamois toga off over her head and drops it onto the cleaning bot, then smashes at it with her fists, as if attempting to squash a very large, very persistent insect.
“Won’t they just be glad I’m alive?” Ripple asks, quieter.
Osmond reaches for the glass of stout in his cup holder. “No.”
Ripple stares glumly out the window. Below them, in the dark, the dragons’ sleek bodies glide like rayfish over the city’s lustrous fires.
“How’s Mom?” he asks.
“Cringe-inducing, as always. The other day she was parading through the Great Hall of our ancestors, wearing nothing but a smile.” He nods at Ripple’s handmade loincloth. “Fashion sense runs in the family, it appears.”
“Actually, I’m freezing. Do you have any PJs or anything?”
“None that I’m willing to share.”
Meanwhile, Abby has succeeded in disabling the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. She flips it over to prod at the casters and the sucto-grips, and to twist the little nozzle, which pitifully fizzes detergent.
“Dunk?” she calls plaintively. “Make it die?”
“Hang on, fem. We’re still talking.” Ripple lowers his voice. “Pro, you gotta help me out here.”
“It would appear that I’ve already done you a rather large favor, by rescuing you from certain death on that noxious landfill.”
“Help me sneak her up to my room.”
Osmond sighs and resettles the voluminous folds of his tan-and-black djellaba. “Duncan, if you think you can conceal this feral woman-child in your toy box for deviant sexual purposes, you vastly underestimate the prowess of our resident exterminator.”
“C’mon, Uncle Osmond. I thought we were buds.”
“I will not be swayed. This behavior is despicable and unsanitary. If your parents weren’t so inexplicably eager for your return, I would airlift you to a pediatrician at once to make sure you’ve had the necessary vaccinations.”
“I like her, though.”
“That’s the infection talking. In my youth, we called syphilitic lunacy ‘the beer goggles of the damned.’ ”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? I’ve been banging her nonstop for a week plus. I can’t just throw her out the window like a Voltage can. Besides, she’s got…skills. It’d be wasteful.”
“And what of your upcoming nuptials?”
“Fuck. Is that next week?”
“The day after tomorrow. Your bride arrives tomorrow night.”
Osmond adjusts the acceleration knob. Below them, in the Heights to the north of Empire Island, the Ripple estate is coming into view. More fortress than mansion, it stands six stories high and a city block square, with battlements ringing the roof’s Astroturf landing pad and the terrace around the fifth floor. Despite the late hour, many of the windows are alight and glowing, with shadows passing by the curtains: night sweepers thumping pillows, dust-sucking the furniture, polishing mirrors for a new day. Osmond taps a panel in the dashboard, radioing in their coordinates. “No, I don’t foresee any potential impediments at all to your long-term happiness.”
* * *
When Ripple arrives home, he finds his mother anxiously waiting for him on the roof in her feathered lingerie with two butlers, a maid, a first-aid kit, and his apehound Hooligan straining on a leash. Ripple hesitates on the ramp, wishing he were dressed, wishing he were showered, wishing he didn’t have quite so many of Abby’s claw marks on his back. Beneath them, the city’s whole skyline darkly slumbers—above it, the dragons blot out the stars. Beside him, his uncle Osmond chortles.
“How good to be home.” Osmond raises his arms in a two-handed victory salute. Duncan brushes some coffee grounds off his knee and clears his throat.
There is an art to disappointing one’s parents. It helps if one does not disappoint already low expectations. It helps if one does something for which there is a name, because no one likes to be both disappointed and confused. It helps, most of al
l, if one can explain what one has done, preferably without profanity and while fully clothed. Ripple realizes that he’s screwed. Fortunately for him, his father stays downstairs.
Katya doesn’t speak as she cleans the gash on his arm with stinging disinfectant, seals it shut with liquid stitches, and rewraps it in a roll of gauze. She puts pressure on the bone and frowns when he winces, then takes his hand and looks closely at his fingers.
“Your nails,” she says sadly.
She’s right: they’re ragged and disgusting, gray-black underneath. For just a moment, Ripple wishes he could transform into another sort of animal, preferably one without hands. Hooligan licks his face.
It takes two hours to coax Abby off the HowLux. It’s a Sin Bun, stuffed with Insomnisnacks from the first-aid kit, that finally does it. Ripple feeds it to her, crumb by gelatinous crumb, until her wild blue eyes turn heavy-lidded and drooping and her whimpers grow infrequent and she loosens her grip on the corpse of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which she’s clutching to her bosom like something precious. Then he picks her up, and to his surprise she clings to him, a drugged and flea-bitten marsupial, her sharp chin digging into his shoulder. With his one good arm he carries her back out onto the roof, where his mother and the servants are sitting on deck chairs, casting long shadows in the landing lights.
“Oh my.” Katya unplugs the meditation aids from her ears. She smiles the way she used to on the bare nightspot stages: like her entire family has just been killed. “Oh my!” Now she’s looking up. The servants follow her gaze; Ripple does too. A piece of the night sky is slowly dropping toward them. With a final fluttering plunge, it perches on one of the battlements. Ripple never thought a bird could glare, but there it is: Cuyahoga.
The Sky Is Yours Page 7