by John Crowley
“I’ll give you a prescription,” said Dr. Nxx.
There was a shirt, and pants, and booties, and a little warm hat, and a warmer shirt to go over it all. The clothes cost a lot of flappers (that’s what they call dollars on the planet Brxx), but at least they didn’t come off every time Trxx wiggled, and leave her cold.
“How do you like it?” Qxx asked her daughter. “How do you like these clothes?”
Trxx just smiled and giggled. Her mother had never seen a baby that looked like Trxx with her clothes on, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Trxx grew fast, and needed more clothes all the time. They got dirty and had to be cleaned. They ripped and split as Trxx got bigger. The buttons fell off and rolled away and got lost.
“You’ll need more buttons,” Dr. Nxx said. “And some of this ‘thread’ and a ‘needle.’ Then you can sew the buttons on again when they come off.”
“Hm,” said Fxx. He took the tiny needle in his big hands. He’d never seen anything so impossible. “And where do we . . .”
“I’ll give you a prescription,” said Dr. Nxx.
Winter came, and the weather got warm and the sun shone brightly. (On the planet Brxx it’s warm in the winter and cold in the summer.) At last Trxx didn’t need to get wrapped up in her shirt and pants and her socks and her other shirt and her little warm hat every day. She could go out with nothing on.
On a hot winter day Trxx’s mother took her to the park to play without her clothes in the sun.
“Nice?” asked her mother.
“Nice,” said Trxx. It was her first word.
But the other people in the park didn’t think it was so nice. Some of them looked at Trxx all naked and furless, and their mouths would curl up in a way that seemed to mean they thought seeing Trxx all naked was creepy, or sad, or too bad. Other kids stopped what they were doing and stared at her.
“Does it hurt?” one person asked Qxx.
“No,” said Qxx. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“Is she sick?” another person asked.
“No,” Qxx said. “She’s not sick.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was born this way,” said Qxx. “She’s fine.”
Trxx didn’t know what the people were saying, and when they stared at her she stared back at them, and smiled.
But her brother Pxx hated the questions people asked.
“Why can’t they mind their own business?” he said.
“They’re curious,” said Qxx.
“Well, they should butt out,” Pxx said.
“Why don’t you go play whackball with those boys?” said Qxx.
But Pxx didn’t want to leave his sister. He was bored and wanted to do something else, but he was afraid that if he left, something bad would happen to Trxx, even though he couldn’t imagine what it would be. He didn’t like the way people looked at her, and he didn’t want her to be different.
“I wish I could give her my fur,” he said. “If I could, I would.”
“Fine,” said his mother. “Then we’d have to buy clothes for you.”
And then she put her arm around her son’s shoulder and hugged him hard.
* * *
“So how are the kids?” Anne-Marie asked Meg. “I never asked.” Meg would have liked to order a great gleaming bowl of scarlet wine like the one Anne-Marie now lifted and sampled; but Anne-Marie was going home by cab, and Meg had a couple of hours of driving between here and home. The snow had just begun to show itself as something more than a bother out the windows.
“The kids are good. No bad news.”
Anne-Marie laughed a little. “The only person I know who’d answer that question that way.”
“Well, they’re fine. They do the things. They knock you out. They . . . I don’t know. They’re like the weather.”
Anne-Marie’s eyes, which could be beautiful when wide, were somewhat reptilian when hooded in doubt, if doubt was what she felt as she regarded Meg.
“So you got a chance to read that kid’s book thing,” Meg asked.
“I did. I liked it. It was fascinating. You know I love your things.”
Meg waited for more.
“I gave it to someone who knows this market,” Anne-Marie said. “I got a report and I made some notes.” She plunged into her bag and did some business with papers that seemed to have come from a phone pad. “Did you know they have people at publishers of children’s books who analyze the vocabulary, to see if the words used match the intended age of the readers?”
“Well, I can imagine.”
“They do.”
“So what did this person think?”
“Well, there’s problems. Of course she liked it and wanted you to know that.”
Meg said nothing.
Anne-Marie glanced at her notes. “She says. It’s too short for a chapter book, but the words and sentences are too hard for an I-can-read-it-myself book, and the subject matter is too hard for a picture book.”
“Really.”
“Another thing,” Anne-Marie said, putting the notes away. “In a kid’s book, as she sees it, and I believe this, you can’t go switching the point of view too often. It’s best to stick to one point of view, one kid or one animal or one grandma or whatever. I think you especially can’t have parents’ point of view overwhelming the child’s point of view. I think that happens in this.”
“I didn’t realize there were so many rules,” Meg said. “In fact, actually I don’t think there are so many. I know the books Perry and Lily love. There’s not always . . .” She stopped then, though, because she saw she had come up on a crux that arises between writer and agent, or writer and publisher, or writer and reader finally: they see something wrong, something that fails, and they don’t really know how to say what it is, something in the toils of the story, sometimes in its core, but what is it? They think they know, and they say “The plot’s not involving” or “The characters aren’t sympathetic” or “The point of view is wrong,” which sound like objective errors being pinned down, but which, a, aren’t that at all but only a way of saying I don’t like it, and b, are therefore impossible to counter with reasonable arguments, and c, no good at all to you as the writer. The only thing worse than leaving it as it is, wounded and feeble, would be to try to fix it by the formulas they give you.
“Listen,” Anne-Marie said. “I know how important this is to you. I know what you’re trying to do with this, to write about the prejudice, the prejudice against people who are different. I get that, and I of course understand. But I just don’t think it’s going to fly in the children’s book world. Something that’s so, you know, directly instructional. They just shy away from stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I wonder if there’s some way to get it out under the sponsorship of some group.”
“Some group?”
“Well, you know, a group that has an educational purpose. Like a group that deals with the problem this is addressing.”
Meg could see the kind of book or booklet Anne-Marie meant. Such things were in every waiting room she went to with Lily, every office. “Okay,” she said. “Never mind. It was just a thing. Thanks for checking it out.”
“It’s not going to go to waste,” Anne-Marie said.
“No. I know. Look, Anne-Marie, I appreciate your trying.”
Anne-Marie drank. “So to get back to your prenatal diagnosis piece.”
“Sure.”
“They’re very interested in it, but you know how it is. If they don’t get involved they think they aren’t important and don’t really have a job.”
“Okay.” A weariness had begun to spread upward from her feet or her knees toward her heart and head. She’d only wanted to do an article, a think piece, but Anne-Marie thought she could get a book deal, and Meg
hadn’t said no yet.
“First there’s what you want to call it—‘A New Delphic Oracle’? Isn’t that a little, I don’t know, remote?”
“Well, you know what the Delphic oracle was, right?”
“Darling, of course I know, but will your readers and bookbuyers know? What are you hoping they’ll get from this title?”
“Well, I thought it was good because of the ambiguity. Oracles are true, but you don’t know in what sense, until they’ve come true. They can be true and yet turn out not to mean at all what you thought they meant. And you have to beware of bringing into being the thing you first thought the oracle meant, usually by trying to avoid it.”
“Like Oedipus.”
“Right.”
“So this relates how?”
Meg crossed her hands as in prayer and bent toward her agent, the only agent she’d ever had. “You get a prenatal diagnosis. Your child has some anomaly. It’s there; it has a name, a prognosis. You try to understand what it means, for the child’s life, for your life. The doctors think they know. You do your best to act on what you think it means, and what the docs think it means. But maybe you also start to bring about that outcome by how you interpret the information. Maybe all of us do, the parents, teachers, docs, grandparents. And maybe you bring about a good outcome. Or not. Maybe not as good as it could be.”
Anne-Marie was one of the first to know about the ultrasound that showed Lily would have problems. It was just a routine scan, and done in Boston; she and Meg had planned on lunch after. “Okay,” she said.
“Then at the far end, you look back and say Yes, it was predicted to be this way. This was what the oracle said, this is what was there all along. But it wasn’t. Not necessarily; not all of it; not what it’s like. What you hope is that you’ll learn better as you go, learn that the possibilities are greater than they seemed.”
“So the oracle can bring about what it predicts. That’s a responsibility. Because the oracle might be wrong.”
“The oracle isn’t wrong,” Meg said. “It just isn’t determining. You determine. You and the gods. The Greeks knew.”
“They knew everything.” Anne-Marie lit a cigarette, this restaurant being one that let her, which is why she came here. “Except the book business.”
Meg reached for the gloves that lay beside her plate. The sense of hopeless incapacity got a little higher: the book business, other people, the weather; the things her life had come to be about, the fight against prediction. “Anne-Marie I’ve got to go. I’m getting scared. It’s been coming down heavier ever since we got here.”
“Weatherman said only a couple of inches.”
“Yeah?” Meg said. “That’s what he predicted?”
They both laughed. “We’ll do this,” Anne-Marie, said. “I feel it’ll work out.”
“Sure,” Meg said. “What’s that thing the Chinese say? Tell me again, Auntie Anne-Marie.”
“The Chinese say,” Anne-Marie said, her favorite catch-phrase, “‘When we reach the mountain, the road upward will appear.’”
[CHAPTER AFTER THE ONE BEFORE]
Trxx grew up. She learned to talk. She was angry sometimes and cried sometimes and sometimes she wanted everything in the world and she wanted it right now and really screamed. But most of the time she was happy. “As happy as the day is long,” said Qxx.
“What does that mean?” Trxx asked her.
“I don’t know what it means. But it’s what you are. Now where’s your shirt?”
“Shirt! I don’t want to!”
“Here it is!” said Pxx.
Pxx had learned to help his mother put on Trxx’s clothes and take them off and even wash and dry them. But Trxx took a lot of time to get dressed, and changed; she couldn’t run out of the house every morning like Pxx could, because she had to get dressed first.
And sometimes she didn’t want to get dressed at all.
“Shirt!”
“I don’t want to!” said Trxx, and started to run.
“Shirt!” said Pxx, and chased after her,
“Trxx!” said her mother, and chased after her too.
Imagine: Trxx was nearly six, and she was smart and handy, and she still couldn’t put on her own clothes! But that was because she didn’t know she was supposed to be able to, and neither did her mother or her father. Nobody said to her: “Oh, everybody who’s six can put their own shirt on! Everybody who’s six can tie their own shoes!”
Because nobody else could.
Of course all the other kids in the neighborhood where Trxx grew up had thick fur, black or blue or red, and thick pads on the soles of their feet, just like her brother Pxx. Some were older than Trxx, and were mostly her brother’s friends; and some were just her age.
Mostly the kids in the neighborhood liked Trxx and played with her and didn’t think all the time that she was the Girl Who Had No Fur.
But sometimes her friends talked to her as though she were a baby, and sometimes they treated her as though she were a doll or a pet. Sometimes they wanted to be best friends, and sometimes they told her to go away, because she couldn’t play the same games as other people.
They weren’t really being mean. They just forgot, sometimes, that—except for having no fur—Trxx was just like them.
“So are you going to go to school?” they asked her one cold day of summer, when everybody was thinking about school starting. All of Trxx’s friends were going to be in the first grade.
“Sure,” said Trxx.
“You are?”
“Sure. Why not?”
All of Trxx’s friends stared at Trxx, and looked at each other as though they knew something she didn’t know.
When Trxx came in from playing, she had a blister on her ankle.
“Trxx!” her mother said. “You have to wear a sock with your shoe or you get a blister. You know that!”
“Mom,” Trxx said. “Am I really going to go to school?”
“You bet you are, my darling dear,” her mother said. “You bet you are.”
“But,” Trxx said. “What if the teacher doesn’t like people with no fur?”
“She does. You met her, Trxx. She likes you.”
“What if the kids don’t like people with no fur?”
“They’ll like you. Some of them are your own friends, Trxx.”
Her mom was trying to clean Trxx’s ankle and get a bandage on. It took her a long time, because she had only done it once before. Your mom does it very quickly, because she’s put bandages on blisters ever since she was a little kid herself.
“What if my shoes come untied?” Trxx said. “Who will tie them?”
“I’ll come to school at lunchtime,” her mother said. “Just to check.” She helped Trxx put on one shoe. “And pretty soon, Trxx, you’ll be able to tie them yourself.”
“I can’t!”
“You’ll learn. I learned. Watch.”
Qxx tied Trxx’s shoes again. While she tried to tie the lace, her tongue came out and curled up. Her furry fingers got stuck in the laces. You could have tied Trxx’s shoes in a minute, but Trxx’s mother took a long time.
One day Qxx found about another child in town who had also been born with no fur.
“Is it a girl?” Trxx asked. “Like me?”
“No, a boy,” said her mother. “His name is Jaxx.”
“How old is he?” Trxx wanted to know. “Six, like me?”
“He’s eight,” said her mother. “But I think he’s very nice.”
Trxx and her mother got ready to go visit the boy with no fur. It was a cold day in summer, and they had to put on almost every piece of clothes Trxx had.
“Someday,” said Qxx to her daughter, “you are going to have to learn to do all these things for yourself!” She was a little impatient and tugged and pulled Trxx’s clothes on.
“I will,” Trxx said. “Someday.”
“And tie your shoes.”
“I will,” Trxx said. “Someday.”
“Someday soon,” said her mother.
Trxx watched her mother and thought: I’ll never learn.
But she would.
The boy who had no fur lived on the other side of town, and Qxx and Trxx took the buxx to see him. On the buxx, a woman with bright orange fur kept staring at Trxx. Trxx stared back, and smiled. When Trxx smiled, she saw a little tear well up in the lady’s eye.
“Brave little thing!” the woman said. “Brave little tyke, putting up with so much!”
“Oh good grief,” Qxx said, so only Trxx could hear. She looked down at her daughter and rolled her eyes so only Trxx could see. Trxx laughed, because that was what her mother always did when people said that Trxx was brave. She said Oh good grief and rolled her eyes.
Trxx wondered why people thought she was brave to have no fur. She was brave when she climbed tall trees and brave when she went to sleep with no night light and brave when she got a shot without freaking out. But what was so brave about having no fur and having to wear clothes?
“I don’t understand people sometimes, Mom,” she said.
“Neither do I, darling,” said her mother. “But then I think a lot of people don’t understand us, either.”
Jaxx and his mother were glad to see Trxx and Qxx. They could understand one another just fine.
“Having no fur sort of runs in our family,” Jaxx’s mother said. She showed them a funny old picture. “My great-uncle Braxx had the same condition. He used to travel with a circus, along with the sword-swallower and the fire-eater. He was called ‘Braxx the All-Bare, The Amazing Furless Man.’ He had some clothes made that looked just like most people’s fur. He would slowly pull them off, until he had nothing on. Just skin. Some people would faint.”