The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Then I felt a small presence at my elbow and turned to meet Sue-lynn’s wide eyes.

  “Teacher?” The word was hardly more than a breath.

  “Yes?” I could tell that for some reason Sue-lynn was loving me dearly at the moment. Maybe because her group had gone into new books that morning. Maybe because I had noticed her new dress, the ruffles of which made her feel very feminine and lovable, or maybe just because the late autumn sun lay so golden across her desk. Anyway, she was loving me to overflowing, and since, unlike most of the children, she had no casual hugs or easy moist kisses, she was bringing her love to me in her encompassing hands.

  “See my box, Teacher? It’s my Anything Box.”

  “Oh, my!” I said. “May I hold it?”

  After all, I have held—tenderly or apprehensively or bravely—tiger magic, live rattlesnakes, dragon’s teeth, poor little dead butterflies and two ears and a nose that dropped off Sojie one cold morning—none of which I could see any more than I could the Anything Box. But I took the squareness from her carefully, my tenderness showing in my fingers and my face.

  And I received weight and substance and actuality!

  Almost I let it slip out of my surprised fingers, but Sue-lynn’s apprehensive breath helped me catch it and I curved my fingers around the precious warmness and looked down, down, past a faint shimmering, down into Sue-lynn’s Anything Box.

  I was running barefoot through the whispering grass. The swirl of my skirts caught the daisies as I rounded the gnarled apple tree at the corner. The warm wind lay along each of my cheeks and chuckled in my ears. My heart outstripped my flying feet and melted with a rush of delight into warmness as his arms—

  I closed my eyes and swallowed hard, my palms tight against the Anything Box. “It’s beautiful!” I whispered. “It’s wonderful, Sue-lynn. Where did you get it?”

  Her hands took it back hastily. “It’s mine,” she said defiantly. “It’s mine.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Be careful now. Don’t drop it.”

  She smiled faintly as she sketched a motion to her pocket. “I won’t.” She patted the flat pocket on her way back to her seat.

  Next day she was afraid to look at me at first for fear I might say something or look something or in some way remind her of what must seem like a betrayal to her now, but after I only smiled my usual smile, with no added secret knowledge, she relaxed.

  A night or so later when I leaned over my moon-drenched window sill and let the shadow of my hair hide my face from such ebullient glory, I remembered the Anything Box. Could I make one for myself? Could I square off this aching waiting, this outreaching, this silent cry inside me, and make it into an Anything Box? I freed my hands and brought them together, thumb to thumb, framing a part of the horizon’s darkness between my upright forefingers. I stared into the empty square until my eyes watered. I sighed, and laughed a little, and let my hands frame my face as I leaned out into the night. To have magic so near—to feel it tingle off my fingertips and then to be so bound that I couldn’t receive it. I turned away from the window—turning my back on brightness.

  It wasn’t long after this that Alpha succeeded in putting sharp points of worry back in my thoughts of Sue-lynn. We had ground duty together, and one morning when we shivered while the kids ran themselves rosy in the crisp air, she sizzed in my ear.

  “Which one is it? The abnormal one, I mean.”

  “I don’t have any abnormal children,” I said, my voice sharpening before the sentence ended because I suddenly realized whom she meant.

  “Well, I call it abnormal to stare at nothing.” You could almost taste the acid in her words. “Who is it?”

  “Sue-lynn,” I said reluctantly. “She’s playing on the bars now.”

  Alpha surveyed the upside-down Sue-lynn whose brief skirts were belled down from her bare pink legs and half covered her face as she swung from one of the bars by her knees. Alpha clutched her wizened, blue hands together and breathed on them. “She looks normal enough,” she said.

  “She is normal!” I snapped.

  “Well, bite my head off!” cried Alpha. “You’re the one that said she wasn’t, not me—or is it ‘not I’? I never could remember. Not me? Not I?”

  The bell saved Alpha from a horrible end. I never knew a person so serenely unaware of essentials and so sensitive to trivia.

  But she had succeeded in making me worry about Sue-lynn again, and the worry exploded into distress a few days later.

  Sue-lynn came to school sleepy-eyed and quiet. She didn’t finish any of her work and she fell asleep during rest time. I cussed TV and Drive-Ins and assumed a night’s sleep would put it right. But next day Sue-lynn burst into tears and slapped Davie clear off his chair.

  “Why Sue-lynn!” I gathered Davie up in all his astonishment and took Sue-lynn’s hand. She jerked it away from me and swung herself at Davie again. She got two handfuls of his hair and had him out of my grasp before I knew it. She threw him bodily against the wall with a flip of her hands, then doubled up her fists and pressed them to her streaming eyes. In the shocked silence of the room, she stumbled over to Isolation and seating herself, back to the class, on the little chair, she leaned her head into the corner and sobbed quietly in big gulping sobs.

  “What on earth goes on?” I asked the stupefied Davie who sat spraddle-legged on the floor fingering a detached tuft of hair. “What did you do?”

  “I only said ‘Robber Daughter,’” said Davie. “It said so in the paper. My mama said her daddy’s a robber. They put him in jail cause he robbered a gas station.” His bewildered face was trying to decide whether or not to cry. Everything had happened so fast that he didn’t know yet if he was hurt.

  “It isn’t nice to call names,” I said weakly. “Get back into your seat. I’ll take care of Sue-lynn later.”

  He got up and sat gingerly down in his chair, rubbing his ruffled hair, wanting to make more of a production of the situation but not knowing how. He twisted his face experimentally to see if he had tears available and had none.

  “Dern girls,” he muttered, and tried to shake his fingers free of a wisp of hair.

  I kept my eye on Sue-lynn for the next half hour as I busied myself with the class. Her sobs soon stopped and her rigid shoulders relaxed. Her hands were softly in her lap and I knew she was taking comfort from her Anything Box. We had our talk together later, but she was so completely sealed off from me by her misery that there was no communication between us. She sat quietly watching me as I talked, her hands trembling in her lap. It shakes the heart, somehow, to see the hands of a little child quiver like that.

  That afternoon I looked up from my reading group, startled, as though by a cry, to catch Sue-lynn’s frightened eyes. She looked around bewildered and then down at her hands again—her empty hands. Then she darted to the Isolation corner and reached under the chair. She went back to her seat slowly, her hands squared to an unseen weight. For the first time, apparently, she had had to go get the Anything Box. It troubled me with a vague unease for the rest of the afternoon.

  Through the days that followed while the trial hung fire, I had Sue-lynn in attendance bodily, but that was all. She sank into her Anything Box at every opportunity. And always, if she had put it away somewhere, she had to go back for it. She roused more and more reluctantly from these waking dreams, and there finally came a day when I had to shake her to waken her.

  I went to her mother, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t understand me, and made me feel like a frivolous gossipmonger taking her mind away from her husband, despite the fact that I didn’t even mention him—or maybe because I didn’t mention him.

  “If she’s being a bad girl, spank her,” she finally said, wearily shifting the weight of a whining baby from one hip to another and pushing her tousled hair off her forehead. “Whatever you do is all right by me. My worrier is all used up. I haven’t got any left for the kids right now.”

  Well, Sue-lynn’s father was found guilty and sent
enced to the State Penitentiary and school was less than an hour old the next day when Davie came up, clumsily a-tiptoe, braving my wrath for interrupting a reading group, and whispered hoarsely, “Sue-lynn’s asleep with her eyes open again, Teacher.”

  We went back to the table and Davie slid into his chair next to a completely unaware Sue-lynn. He poked her with a warning finger. “I told you I’d tell on you.”

  And before our horrified eyes, she toppled, as rigidly as a doll, sideways off the chair. The thud of her landing relaxed her and she lay limp on the green asphalt tile—a thin paper doll of a girl, one hand still clenched open around something. I pried her fingers loose and almost wept to feel enchantment dissolve under my heavy touch. I carried her down to the nurse’s room and we worked over her with wet towels and prayer and she finally opened her eyes.

  “Teacher,” she whispered weakly.

  “Yes, Sue-lynn.” I took her cold hands in mine.

  “Teacher, I almost got in my Anything Box.”

  “No,” I answered. “You couldn’t. You’re too big.”

  “Daddy’s there,” she said. “And where we used to live.”

  I took a long, long look at her wan face. I hope it was genuine concern for her that prompted my next words. I hope it wasn’t envy or the memory of the niggling nagging of Alpha’s voice that put firmness in my voice as I went on. “That’s playlike,” I said. “Just for fun.”

  Her hands jerked protestingly in mine. “Your Anything Box is just for fun. It’s like Davie’s cow pony that he keeps in his desk or Sojie’s jet plane, or when the big bear chases all of you at recess. It’s fun-for-play, but it’s not for real. You mustn’t think it’s for real. It’s only play.”

  “No!” she denied. “No!” she cried frantically, and hunching herself up on the cot, peering through her tear-swollen eyes, she scrabbled under the pillow and down beneath the rough blanket that covered her.

  “Where is it?” she cried. “Where is it? Give it back to me, Teacher!”

  She flung herself toward me and pulled open both my clenched hands.

  “Where did you put it? Where did you put it?”

  “There is no Anything Box,” I said flatly, trying to hold her to me and feeling my heart breaking along with hers.

  “You took it!” she sobbed. “You took it away from me! And she wrenched herself out of my arms.

  “Can’t you give it back to her?” whispered the nurse. “If it makes her feel so bad? Whatever it is—”

  “It’s just imagination,” I said, almost sullenly. “I can’t give her back something that doesn’t exist.”

  Too young! I thought bitterly. Too young to learn that heart’s desire is only play-like.

  Of course the doctor found nothing wrong. Her mother dismissed the matter as a fainting spell and Sue-lynn came back to class next day, thin and listless, staring blankly out the window, her hands palm down on the desk. I swore by the pale hollow of her cheek that never, never again would I take any belief from anyone without replacing it with something better. What had I given Sue-lynn? What had she better than I had taken from her? How did I know but that her Anything Box was on purpose to tide her over rough spots in her life like this? And what now, now that I had taken it from her?

  Well, after a time she began to work again, and later, to play. She came back to smiles, but not to laughter. She puttered along quite satisfactorily except that she was a candle blown out. The flame was gone wherever the brightness of belief goes. And she had no more sharing smiles for me, no overflowing love to bring to me. And her shoulder shrugged subtly away from my touch.

  Then one day I suddenly realized that Sue-lynn was searching our classroom. Stealthily, casually, day by day she was searching, covering every inch of the room. She went through every puzzle box, every lump of clay, every shelf and cupboard, every box and bag. Methodically she checked behind every row of books and in every child’s desk until finally, after almost a week, she had been through everything in the place except my desk. Then she began to materialize suddenly at my elbow every time I opened a drawer. And her eyes would probe quickly and sharply before I slid it shut again. But if I tried to intercept her looks, they slid away and she had some legitimate errand that had brought her up to the vicinity of the desk.

  She believes it again, I thought hopefully. She won’t accept the fact that her Anything Box is gone. She wants it again.

  But it is gone, I thought drearily. It’s really-for-true gone.

  My head was heavy from troubled sleep, and sorrow was a weariness in all my movements. Waiting is sometimes a burden almost too heavy to carry. While my children hummed happily over their fun-stuff, I brooded silently out the window until I managed a laugh at myself. It was a shaky laugh that threatened to dissolve into something else, so I brisked back to my desk.

  As good a time as any to throw out useless things, I thought, and to see if I can find that colored chalk I put away so carefully. I plunged my hands into the wilderness of the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk. It was deep with a huge accumulation of anything—just anything— that might need a temporary hiding place. I knelt to pull out leftover Jack Frost pictures, and a broken bean-shooter, a chewed red ribbon, a roll of cap gun ammunition, one striped sock, six Numbers papers, a rubber dagger, a copy of The Gospel According to St. Luke, a miniature coal shovel, patterns for jack-o’-lanterns, and a pink plastic pelican. I retrieved my Irish linen hankie I thought lost forever and Sojie’s report card that he had told me solemnly had blown out of his hand and landed on a jet and broke the sound barrier so loud that it busted all to flitters. Under the welter of miscellany, I felt a squareness. Oh, happy! I thought, this is where I put the colored chalk! I cascaded papers off both sides of my lifting hands and shook the box free.

  We were together again. Outside, the world was an enchanting wilderness of white, the wind shouting softly through the windows, tapping wet, white fingers against the warm light. Inside, all the worry and waiting, the apartness and loneliness were over and forgotten, their hugeness dwindled by the comfort of a shoulder, the warmth of clasping hands—and nowhere, nowhere was the fear of parting, nowhere the need to do without again. This was the happy ending. This was—

  This was Sue-lynn’s Anything Box!

  My racing heart slowed as the dream faded—and rushed again at the realization. I had it here! In my junk drawer! It had been here all the time!

  I stood up shakily, concealing the invisible box in the flare of my skirts. I sat down and put the box carefully in the center of my desk, covering the top of it with my palms lest I should drown again in delight. I looked at Sue-lynn. She was finishing her fun paper, competently but unjoyously. Now would come her patient sitting with quiet hands until told to do something else.

  Alpha would approve. And very possibly, I thought, Alpha would, for once in her limited life, be right. We may need “hallucinations” to keep us going—all of us but the Alphas—but when we go so far as to try to force ourselves, physically, into the Never-Neverland of heart’s desire—

  I remembered Sue-lynn’s thin rigid body toppling doll-like off its chair. Out of her deep need she had found—or created? Who could tell?—something too dangerous for a child. I could so easily bring the brimming happiness back to her eyes—but at what a possible price!

  No, I had a duty to protect Sue-lynn. Only maturity— the maturity born of the sorrow and loneliness that Sue-lynn was only beginning to know—could be trusted to use an Anything Box safely and wisely.

  My heart thudded as I began to move my hands, letting the palms slip down from the top to shape the sides of—

  I had moved them back again before I really saw, and I have now learned almost to forget that glimpse of what heart’s desire is like when won at the cost of another’s heart.

  I sat there at the desk trembling and breathless, my palms moist, feeling as if I had been on a long journey away from the little schoolroom. Perhaps I had. Perhaps I had been shown all the kingdoms of the w
orld in a moment of time.

  “Sue-lynn,” I called. “Will you come up here when you’re through?”

  She nodded unsmilingly and snipped off the last paper from the edge of Mistress Mary’s dress. Without another look at her handiwork, she carried the scissors safely to the scissors box, crumpled the scraps of paper in her hand and came up to the wastebasket by the desk.

  “I have something for you, Sue-lynn,” I said, uncovering the box.

  Her eyes dropped to the desk top. She looked indifferently up at me. “I did my fun paper already.”