And Go Like This

by John Crowley

“Wasn’t he embarrassed?” Trxx asked. “With all those people looking at him?”

  “Well, not after a while. He said he loved show business. And people did pay a flapper apiece to see him.”

  While Qxx and Jaxx’s mother sat in the kitchen and drank hot gurgle and talked about where to get clothes made cheap, Jaxx and Trxx played together.

  They talked while they played, about everything in the world. About clothes and how awful they were. About what it would be like if it were hot in the summer and cold in the winter, instead of the other way around the way it is on the planet Brxx. They talked about getting sunburned (nobody else knew what that felt like) and going swimming naked (nobody else knew what that felt like, either).

  Jaxx called other people “the furballs” and made Trxx laugh.

  “Jaxx,” she said. “I have a question.”

  “What’s the question?” said Jaxx.

  “What do you say when a little kid or somebody comes up to you and stares at you and goes What’s the matter with you?”

  “That’s easy,” Jaxx said. “I tell them I’m from another planet.” He stood up and stuck out his chest. “I tell them I came here to Brxx from another planet, and I tell them that on my planet nobody has fur and everybody looks like me. And that on my planet I have super-powers so they better watch out.”

  Trxx laughed. Trxx’s mother laughed too, and Jaxx’s mother smiled and shook her head.

  “And,” said Jaxx, “I tell them that if any furballs ever ended up on my planet, we’d probably put them in the zoo.”

  Trxx laughed so hard she almost fell down. She didn’t think Jaxx really said that to people who asked him What’s wrong with you? or What happened to you? But ever after, when somebody asked her a question like that, she would think of Jaxx, and laugh.

  * * *

  A week or two after the ultrasound had shown them Lily wound palely inside Meg, her flawed spine traceable like the spine of a translucent guppy, a snowstorm like this one had fallen over their house. It was one of those spring snowstorms that come down in big sodden flakes and layer the trees as though with thick pudding or wet wash, comical-seeming snow that’s not funny in fact; it began in the night and when morning came and John went out to the porch it was grievous. The tall arbor-vitae cedars that stood in pairs on the corners of the lot were so heavy-headed that they had bent nearly double, and the low branches of the big firs in the back were laid down into the mounting heap as though consumed. As soon as the fall of it subsided, John pulled on boots and took a broom and a long-handled plastic rake and labored out through it to the cedars, to try to knock off enough snow to release them, so they wouldn’t break; he beat at the branches and combed with the plastic rake, and some of the branches did lift away like arms freed from shackles, and the tree raised its head a little, but some of the branches, some of the biggest too and not the small springy ones, didn’t snap free. Broken. One whole secondary trunk of the smaller of the pair, broken, unresponsive. When he had done all he could, throat seared with cold and boots filled with snow, he made his way to the firs, going down on his knees once as he waded forward. God damn it, he breathed. God damn it. It was so unfair, a snow so heavy, so wrong that spring could come so close and then do this. He reached the firs and it was the same: he beat at the bound limbs to knock away their burden and some lifted free and grateful, amazing resilience, flinging snow in his face as they went up, but some not, inert, unable to rise, broken, you couldn’t see beneath the smothering snow which was hurt and which wasn’t. He tugged at them with icy hands to pull them free, but some wouldn’t come up when he had loosened them, couldn’t spring.

  He sat back at last exhausted. He was weeping in anger and hurt. God damn it, he said again and again. God damn New England. Cruel, cruel New England.

  Perry and Lily had grown tired of valentines; they piled theirs in two piles and John hid away the valentine for Meg to put with her breakfast next day. Then he made popcorn for dinner, something Meg sometimes did on nights of emergency or hurry or many urgent claims, which this seemed somehow to be even though they couldn’t do anything but sit. When a car came close and stopped—they could only see its lights and hear the slow milling of its tires out on the road—it turned out to be the newspaper deliverer, hero or dope out on his rounds in his ancient Chevy Malibu. Perry pulled on boots and coat and went out to the box at the driveway’s end to get their paper, and then sat eating popcorn and turning big pages one by one, reading the headlines aloud, letting Lily and John know the news. The high school was putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and there were to be real flying fairies in it.

  “It’s a play by Shakespeare,” John said. “There are fairies in it.”

  “Real flying fairies?”

  “Well, actually it says with wires,” John said, looking over Perry’s shoulder.

  Perry studied the text, brows knit with effort to decode the false claims. Kids from middle school were being recruited to be Peaseblossom and Cobweb. Flying. Perry wondered if he envied them.

  “Usually the fairies don’t fly in this play,” John said. “They just well sort of trip.”

  “They trip?” asked Lily. That smile of wonder she had at things, at things she didn’t get, as though they tickled her by their weirdness. Always. When she’d started to talk, her first complete sentence was Where’d come from? About some object that she hadn’t suspected would be produced before her, what was it, a bar of Castile soap, a rubber duck, a bunch of flowers. Where’d come from? In delight and confusion.

  “I mean they sort of dance along. Tripping.” He did some tripping, little steps, winglike arms fluttering delicately. “Where the bee sucks, there suck I,” he sang in falsetto. “In the cowslip’s bell I lie.”

  Perry danced too, flying; then pretended to trip and fall, flail to stay upright, trip again, regain balance. Lily jumped and spun. The phone rang and stilled them.

  “How is it there?” Meg asked.

  “It’s not good. They’re saying six to eight inches. But you know how it is. Every county’s different. It could be okay all the way till you start up the hills.”

  “Well, I’m coming,” Meg said. “We’re done here.”

  “How did it go?”

  “I’ll explain,” she said. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Tripping,” said John.

  [NEXT-TO-LAST CHAPTER]

  Every weekmiddle, Fxx, Trxx’s father, went to play whackball with his friends. (On the planet Brxx, they don’t have weekends, but they do take two days off in the middle of the week, and that’s called the weekmiddle.)

  Fxx was an excellent whackball player, and over time he had practiced and got better and better. Almost every time he played, he beat his friends easily.

  One weekmiddle day after they had finished a game and Fxx had won again, he said with a grin: “Well, this isn’t much fun.”

  His friends agreed. They decided the only way to make the game fun again was to give Fxx a handicap. That means they made it harder for Fxx to play, so that the game would be more even. What they did was to make Fxx tie one hand behind his back.

  With the handicap, one hand tied behind his back, Fxx had to try much harder. He had to think carefully at every stroke. His friends got way ahead at first, and though Fxx did well, considering his handicap, one of his friends won that game.

  As they were all laughing together at the end of the game, Fxx suddenly had a thought:

  This must be what it’s like for Trxx, he thought. Trxx is playing with a handicap. She’s just like everybody else, but with something taken away. Like my hand tied behind my back.

  When he came home that night he told Qxx what he had thought of. “Trxx is playing with a handicap,” he said. “She’s just like everybody else, but with something missing.”

  “Hmm,” said Qxx.

  “That means she has to try harder, bu
t if she does, she can do anything she wants.”

  “Hmm,” said Qxx. “I don’t know. I have to think about that.” She didn’t like thinking that Trxx was like everybody else, except with something missing. But maybe Fxx was right.

  That night Qxx dreamed that there really was a planet like the one Jaxx pretended he came from. She dreamed she went there in a spaceship.

  On this planet everyone was like Trxx and Jaxx: they had no fur at all, only a little hair on the tops of their heads or on their faces. All of them, every one, had to wear clothes all the time, and shoes too.

  She saw them, in her dream, going up and down the streets, in and out of the stores and houses, every one of them in their clothes: shoes and socks and pants and coats and hats and scarfs and mittens.

  Some of the stores they went in sold nothing but clothes. Of course! If everyone needed them, they would be for sale everywhere! No wondering where to get them, no prescription from the doctor! Store after store with clothes for men and women, little clothes for boys and girls, whole stores with nothing but tiny clothes for babies! Qxx almost cried in her dream to see them.

  In their houses, these people had special little rooms to put all their different clothes in, and special hangers to hang them on. They had long mirrors in their bedrooms to look at themselves in and see if their clothes were straight and neat. People didn’t have just one set of clothes or two sets, they had many different sets, dozens of different shirts and socks and scarves and hats. They had clothes to go swimming in. They had clothes to go to bed in.

  They even had clothes for their beds!

  And the most amazing thing of all was that nobody thought that wearing clothes was strange.

  Qxx laughed in her dream as she sailed over this amazing impossible planet. She thought: If nobody has fur, then not having fur is normal.

  The people of this planet didn’t think it was brave to wear clothes; they didn’t think it was dreadful, and they didn’t think it was special. They didn’t mind wearing them, or buying them, or keeping them clean. No little tear welled up in people’s eyes when they saw children in their funny clothes; nobody made the creepy mouth to see other people without their clothes on and their bare skin showing; nobody made fun of them, either.

  Wearing clothes was normal.

  Qxx dreamed that she landed her spaceship and stepped out. And in her dream, Qxx saw the people of the planet turn to look at her. And she looked down at herself to see the bright red fur that clothed her from head to foot.

  Qxx understood, just then, how Trxx felt when people stared at her and tried to figure her out. It was very uncomfortable.

  The people of the planet in their clothes and hats and shoes came closer, with expressions of amazement and even fear on their bare faces. Qxx thought some of them might faint, as the people did who came to see Braxx the All-Bare.

  “Hey,” said Qxx. She held out her arms to show herself, furry as could be. “Hey! It’s normal for me!”

  Then she woke up.

  * * *

  This prejudice against people who are different. Meg pondered that, Anne-Marie’s summary of what her probably foolish little book had been about, and wondered how she’d got that idea. Was there something in it that would push a reader toward that, or was it just what the reader expected to see there and so saw it anyway? Anne-Marie was probably right that it wasn’t really a children’s book at all, only sort of seemed like one, but what it was about ought to have been clear. If everybody could fly (Meg explained to no one), then anyone who couldn’t would be at a disadvantage: even though they’d be just as able as they are now. Because everything would be arranged for people who could fly. That’s all. “That’s all,” she said aloud, and just then realized she had been carelessly turning out of her lane into a less-plowed one to pass a truck. She felt her heart in her mouth (one of those phrases that make no sense until you’ve felt it) and fell back with care into the safer lane, her wipers wiping furiously at the snow flung up by the truck.

  Pay attention, she said within. I’ll pay attention.

  It was a long time, but she was now in sight of what she thought of as the half way mark, the stacks of a chemical plant of some kind, lit luridly, hard to apprehend from a distance, its floodlit smoke rising into the blowing snow, like a Turner storm done in black and white. Half way. But now along the road she began to see cars on the margins, in the breakdown lane, sometimes askew or otherwise seeming not to be there on purpose; sometimes a dome-light on, shining within a car rapidly coming to be covered with snow, a lamp lit in an igloo. It was bad. It was evidently and obviously really not good. She began to think that it was stupid, she’d been stupid, should have stayed over, found a hotel, she was almost beginning to think she should pull off now into the streets of Sturbridge or Brimfield and find a motel: she could envision the streets she would have to get through, the quick-falling snow veiling the streetlights, the local plows maybe not out, no it was hopeless: she told herself so, told herself it wasn’t the way you do this, considering hopeless alternatives, visualizing hopeless escapes. You just keep on: you keep on and cover every mile, one at a time, not in advance or in hope but only by doing it, and only counting it as done when it was done. Just keep on, she thought. Just keep on steady.

  John thought of her thinking these things, envisioned her seeing these things, both the cars she saw along the highway margins and the streets and roads of villages that she pictured; he thought of her going on, telling herself how to go on. So often had they both traveled that stretch of Interstate, going to or from things that had been hard or impossible to imagine in advance or carrying home consequences that couldn’t be calculated: operations and consultations and examinations. Prognoses. He could see her, the seat snugged up tightly to the steering wheel the way she liked it, both her hands at the top of the wheel and her head slightly forward, as though to see a little farther into what was coming.

  [LAST CHAPTER]

  When Qxx woke up she remembered: today is the first day of school.

  “Mom!” Trxx called. “Help!”

  Qxx jumped up. Outside the cold wind blew and the rain fell. It was a cold summer day. Trxx was trying to get her shirt on, and her head was stuck in the head hole, and her left arm was stuck in the right arm hole.

  She was learning to put on her own clothes, but sometimes she got confused.

  Trxx was up especially early, because her mother knew it would take her longer than most kids to get ready for school. After all, if you’re covered with thick fur, and you don’t wear jammies and you don’t wear clothes, all you have to do is get up, eat your crackles and drink your slurp, brush your teeth, and go. You don’t even have to make your bed!

  But Trxx took longer. Even when everybody helped.

  “Shoes,” said Fxx. “On.”

  “No no,” said Qxx. “Socks first, remember?”

  “Ah,” said Fxx. Socks.”

  “Pants,” said Pxx.

  “No no,” said Trxx. “Underpants first!”

  “Oh yeah,” said Pxx.

  “Mittens!” Qxx said to Trxx. “Hat!”

  When Trxx was all ready, and her hair was brushed (and Pxx’s fur was brushed) and her hat was tied on and her scarf was knotted around her neck, the others stood for a minute and looked at her.

  “Hey,” said Fxx. “First grader!”

  Trxx was all ready to go when she decided to have one more bite of crackles and one more sip of slurp to give her strength. But when she picked up her big cup in her mitten hand, it slipped. It started to slip and kept on slipping faster while everybody stared in horror and couldn’t move.

  Then Pxx jumped and tried to catch the cup. Too late!

  “Oh no! Trxx!”

  “Oops,” said Trxx. “Oh no.”

  Trxx was covered from scarf to shoes with sticky brown slurp. Ugh!

  Her coat was
wet, and so they took that off. Underneath, her shirt was wet, so they took that off too, and her pants. Underneath her pants her underpants were wet, so they took them off.

  The stuff had even got into her shoes. Her socks were wet, and she had to take them off too.

  Then they had to start all over again.

  “I can’t do this,” Trxx moaned. “I’ll never be able to.”

  “You can do anything you want,” said Qxx. “You can do what you want to do. It just takes you a little longer.”

  “A lot longer,” Trxx said angrily.

  “Sometimes a lot longer,” said Qxx.

  “Like hours.”

  “Then we’ll get up earlier,” said Qxx.

  “Then I’ll be tired.”

  “We’ll go to sleep earlier.”

  “Oop, there they go,” said Pxx.

  He pointed out the window.

  Across the field the other kids were running and tumbling and yelling and chasing after each other on their way to school. The wind howled and the cold rain fell, but the kids laughed at it. In school they would sit in their seats in their warm coats and the smell of drying fur would fill the room.

  Trxx looked after them. They were getting farther and farther away. She was going to be last.

  Of course.

  For a minute, just for a minute, Trxx decided that she would never put on her stupid clothes ever again, and never go outside again, just stay inside and cover herself up with her mother and father the way she had when she was a baby, and sleep forever.

  That made her sad.

  And then she got mad.

  Suddenly she jumped up. “Okay!” she said. “Underpants!”

  “Underpants,” Qxx said. “Right.” She found underpants.

  “Socks!” Trxx shouted. “One for each foot!” She struggled into her underpants while her parents and Pxx looked for her only other pair of socks.