Alyx - Joanna Russ (26 page)

“Well! This isn’t a very pleasant thing to find on a Saturday morning, is it?”

I still didn’t say anything, only looked at my food. I heard my mother say worriedly, “She’s not eating, Ben,” and my father put his hand on the back of my chair so I couldn’t push it away from the table, as I was trying to do.

“Of course you have an explanation for this,” he said. “Don’t you?”

I said nothing.

“Of course she does,” he said, “doesn’t she, Bess? You wouldn’t hurt your mother like this. You wouldn’t hurt your mother by stealing a book that you knew you weren’t supposed to read and for very good reason, too. You know we don’t punish you. We talk things over with you. We try to explain. Don’t we?” I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Then where did this book come from?”

I muttered something; I don’t know what.

“Is my daughter angry?” said my father. “Is my daughter
being rebellious?”

“She told you all about it!” I blurted out. My father’s face turned red.

“Don’t you dare talk about your mother that way!” he shouted, standing up. “Don’t you
dare
refer to your mother in that way!”

“Now, Ben—” said my mother.

“Your mother is the soul of unselfishness,” said my father, “and don’t you forget it, missy; your mother has worried about you since the day you were born and if you don’t appreciate that, you can damn well—”

“Ben!” said my mother, shocked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and then I said, “I’m very sorry, Mother.” My father sat down. My father had a mustache and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked down; now one lock fell over the part in front and his whole face was gray and quivering. He was staring fixedly at his coffee cup. My mother came over and poured coffee for him; then she took the coffeepot into the kitchen and when she came back she had milk for me. She put the glass of milk on the table near my plate. Then she sat down again. She smiled tremblingly at my father, then she put her hand over mine on the table and said:

“Darting, why did you read that book?”

“Well?” said my father from across the table.

There was a moment’s silence. Then:

“Good morning!” and

“Good morning!” and

“Good morning!” said our guest cheerfully, crossing the dining room in two strides, and folding herself carefully down into her breakfast chair, from where her knees stuck out, she reached across the table, picked up
The Green Hat,
propped it up next to her plate and began to read it with great absorption. Then she looked up. “You have a very progressive library,” she said. “I took the liberty of recommending this exciting book to your daughter. You told me it was your favorite. You sent all the way to New York City on purpose for it, yes?”

“I don’t—I quite—” said my mother, pushing back her chair from the table. My mother was trembling from head to foot and her face was set in an expression of fixed distaste. Our visitor regarded first my mother and then my father, bending over them tenderly and with exquisite interest. She said:

“I hope you do not mind my using your library.”

“No no no,” muttered my father.

“I eat almost for two,” said our visitor modestly, “because of my height. I hope you do not mind that?”

“No, of course not,” said my father, regaining control of himself. “Good. It is all considered in the bill,” said the visitor, and looking about at my shrunken parents, each hurried, each spooning in the food and avoiding her gaze, she added deliberately:

“I took also another liberty. I removed from the endpapers certain—ah—drawings that I did not think bore any relation to the text. You do not mind?”

And as my father and mother looked in shocked surprise and utter consternation—at each other—she said to me in a low voice, “Don’t eat. You’ll make yourself sick,” and then smiled warmly at the two of them when my mother went off into the kitchen and my father remembered he was late for work. She waved at them. I jumped up as soon as they were out of the room.

“There was no drawings in that book!” I whispered.

“Then we must make some,” said she, and taking a pencil off the whatnot, she drew in the endpapers of the book a series of sketches: the heroine sipping a soda in an ice-cream parlor, showing her legs and very chic; in a sloppy bathing suit and big grin, holding up a large fish; driving her Hispano Suiza into a tree only to be catapulted straight up into the air; and in the last sketch landing demure and coy in the arms of the hero, who looked violently surprised. Then she drew a white mouse putting on lipstick, getting married to another white mouse in a church, the two entangled in some manner I thought I should not look at, the lady mouse with a big belly and two little mice inside (who were playing chess), then the little mice coming out in separate envelopes and finally the whole family having a picnic, with some things around the picnic basket that I did not recognize and underneath in capital letters “I did not bring up my children to test cigarettes." This left me blank. She laughed and rubbed it out, saying that it was out of date. Then she drew a white mouse with a rolled-up umbrella chasing my mother. I picked that up and looked at it for a while; then I tore it into pieces, and tore the others into pieces as well. I said, "I don’t think you have the slightest right to—” and stopped. She was looking at me with—not anger exactly—not warning exactly—I found I had to sit down. I began to cry.

“Ah! The results of practical psychology,” she said dryly, gathering up the pieces of her sketches. She took matches off the whatnot and set fire to the pieces in a saucer. She held up the smoking match between her thumb and forefinger, saying, “You see? The finger is—shall we say, perception?—but the thumb is money. The thumb is hard.”

“You oughtn’t to treat my parents that way!” I said, crying.

“You ought not to tear up my sketches,” she said calmly.

“Why not! Why not!” I shouted.

“Because they are worth money,” she said, “in some quarters. I won’t draw you any more,” and indifferently taking the saucer with the ashes in it in one palm, she went into the kitchen. I heard her voice and then my mother’s, and then my mother’s again, and then our visitor’s in a tone that would’ve made a rock weep, but I never found out what they said.

I passed our guest’s room many times at night that summer, going in by the hall past her rented room where the second-floor windows gave out onto the dark garden. The electric lights were always on brilliantly. My mother had sewn the white curtains because she did every thing like that and had bought the furniture at a sale: a marble-topped bureau, the wardrobe, the iron bedstead, an old Victrola against the wall. There was usually an open book on the bed. I would stand in the shadow of the open doorway and look across the bare wood floor, too much of it and all as slippery as the sea, bare wood waxed and shining in the electric light. A black dress hung on the front of the wardrobe and a pair of shoes like my mother’s, T-strap shoes with thick heels. I used to wonder if she had silver evening slippers inside the wardrobe. Sometimes the open book on the bed was Wells’s
The Time Machine
and then I would talk to the black glass of the window, I would say to the transparent reflections and the black branches of trees that moved beyond it.

“I’m only sixteen.”

“You look eighteen,” she would say.

“I know,” I would say. “I’d like to be eighteen. I’d like to go away to college. To Radcliffe, I think.”

She would say nothing, out of surprise.

“Are you reading Wells?” I would say then, leaning against the doorjamb. “I think that’s funny. Nobody in this town reads anything; they just think about social life. I read a lot, however. I would like to learn a great deal.”

She would smile then, across the room.

“I did something funny once,” I would go on. “I mean funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar.” It was a real line, very popular. “I read
The Time Machine
and then I went around asking people were they Eloi or were they Morlocks; everyone liked it. The point is which you would be if you could, like being an optimist or a pessimist or do you like bobbed hair.” Then I would add, “Which are you?” and she would only shrug and smile a little more. She would prop her chin on one long, long hand and look into my eyes with her black Egyptian eyes and then she would say in her curious hoarse voice: “It is you who must say it first.”

“I think,” I would say, “that you are a Morlock,” and sitting on the bed in my mother’s rented room with
The Time Machine
open beside her, she would say:

“You are exactly right. I am a Morlock. I am a Morlock on vacation. I have come from the last Morlock meeting, which is held out between the stars in a big goldfish bowl, so all the Morlocks have to cling to the inside walls like a flock of black bats, some right side up, some upside down, for there is no up and down there, clinging like a flock of black crows, like a chestnut burr turned inside out. There are half a thousand Morlocks and we rule the worlds. My black uniform is in the waidrobe.”

“I knew I was right,” I would say.

“You are always right,” she would say, “and you know the rest of it, too. You know what murderers we are and how terribly we live. We are waiting for the big bang when everything falls over and even the Morlocks will be destroyed; meanwhile I stay here waiting for the signal and I leave messages clipped to the frame of your mother’s amateur oil painting of Main Street because it will be in a museum some day and my friends can find it; meanwhile I read
The Time Machine.”

Then I would say, “Can I come with you?” leaning against the door.

“Without you,” she would say gravely, “all is lost,” and taking out from the wardrobe a black dress glittering with stars and a pair of silver sandals with high heels, she would say, “These are yours. They were my great-grandmother’s, who founded the Order. In the name of Trans-Temporal Military Authority.” And I would put them on.

It was almost a pity she was not really there.

Every year in the middle of August the Country Club gave a dance, not just for the rich families who were members but also for the “nice” people who lived in frame houses in town and even for some of the smart, economical young couples who lived in apartments, just as if they had been in the city. There was one new, redbrick apartment building downtown, four stories high, with a courtyard. We were supposed to go, because I was old enough that year, but the day before the dance my father became ill with pains in his left side and my mother had to stay home to take care of him. He was propped up on pillows on the living-room daybed, which we had pulled out into the room so he could watch what my mother was doing with the garden out back and call to her once in a while through the windows. He could also see the walk leading up to the front door. He kept insisting that she was doing things all wrong. I did not even ask if I could go to the dance alone. My father said:

“Why don’t you go out and help your mother?”

“She doesn’t want me to,” I said. “I’m supposed to stay here,” and then he shouted angrily, “Bess! Bess!” and began to give her instructions through the window. I saw another pair of hands appear in the window next to my mother’s and then our guest-squatting back on her heels and smoking a cigarette—pulling up weeds. She was working quickly and efficiently, the cigarette between her teeth. “No, not that way!” shouted my father, pulling on the blanket that my mother had put over him. “Don’t you know what you’re doing! Bess, you’re ruining everything! Stop it! Do it right!” My mother looked bewildered and upset; she passed out of the window and our visitor took her place; she waved to my father and he subsided, pulling the blanket up around his neck. “I don’t like women who smoke,” he muttered irritably. I slipped out through the kitchen.

My father’s toolshed and working space took up the farther half of the back yard; the garden was spread over the nearer half, part kitchen garden, part flowers, and then extended down either side of the house where we had fifteen feet or so of space before a white slat fence and the next people’s side yard. It was an on-and-offish garden, and the house was beginning to need paint. My mother was working in the kitchen garden, kneeling. Our guest was standing, pruning the lilac trees, still smoking. I said:

“Mother, can’t I go, can’t I
go!”
in a low voice.

My mother passed her hand over her forehead and called “Yes, Ben!” to my father.

“Why
can't
I go!” I whispered. “Ruth’s mother and Betty’s mother will be there. Why couldn’t you call Ruth’s mother and Betty’s mother?”

“
Not that way!”
came a blast from the living-room window. My mother sighed briefly and then smiled a cheerful smile. “Yes, Ben!” she called brightly. “I’m listening.” My father began to give some more instructions.

“Mother,” I said desperately, “why couldn’t you—”

“Your father wouldn’t approve,” she said, and again she produced a bright smile and called encouragingly to my father. I wandered over to the lilac trees where our visitor, in her usual nondescript black dress, was piling the dead wood under the tree. She took a last puff on her cigarette, holding it between thumb and forefinger, then ground it out in the grass and picked up in both arms the entire lot of dead wood. She carried it over to the fence and dumped it.

“My father says you shouldn’t prune trees in August,” I blurted suddenly.

“Oh?” she said.

“It hurts them,” I whispered.

“Oh,” she said. She had on gardening gloves, though much too small; she picked up the pruning shears and began snipping again through inch-thick trunks and dead branches that snapped explosively when they broke and whipped out at your face. She was efficient and very quick.

I said nothing at all, only watched her face.

She shook her head decisively.

“But Ruth’s mother and Betty’s mother—” I began, faltering.

“I never go out,” she said.

“You needn’t stay,” I said, placating.

“Never,” she said. “Never at all,” and snapping free a particularly large, dead, silvery branch from the lilac tree, she put it in my arms. She stood there looking at me and her look was suddenly very severe, very unpleasant, something foreign, like the look of somebody who had seen people go off to battle to die, the “movies” look but hard, hard as nails. I knew I wouldn’t get to go anywhere. I thought she might have seen battles in the Great War, maybe even been in some of it. I said, although I could barely speak: