Alyx - Joanna Russ (27 page)

“Were you in the Great War?”

“Which great war?” said our visitor. Then she said, “No, I never go out,” and returned to scissoring the trees.

On the night of the dance my mother told me to get dressed, and I did. There was a mirror on the back of my door, but the window was better; it softened everything; it hung me out in the middle of a black space and made my eyes into mysterious shadows. I was wearing pink organdy and a bunch of daisies from the garden, not the wild kind. I came downstairs and found our visitor waiting for me at the bottom: tall, bare-armed, almost beautiful, for she’d done something to her impossible hair and the rusty reddish black curled slickly like the best photographs. Then she moved and I thought she was altogether beautiful, all black and rippling silver like a Paris dress or better still a New York dress, with a silver band around her forehead like an Indian princess’s and silver shoes with the chunky heels and the one strap over the instep.

She said, “Ah! don’t you look nice,” and then in a whisper, taking my arm and looking down at me with curious gentleness, “I’m going to be a bad chaperone. I’m going to disappear.”

“Well!” said I, inwardly shaking, “I hope I can take care of myself, I should think.” But I hoped she wouldn’t leave me alone and I hoped that no one would laugh at her. She was really incredibly tall.

“Your father’s going to sleep at ten,” said my mother. “Be back by eleven. Be happy.” And she kissed me.

But Ruth’s father, who drove Ruth and I and Ruth’s mother and our guest to the Country Club, did not laugh. And neither did anyone else. Our visitor seemed to have put on a strange gracefulness with her dress, and a strange sort of kindliness, too, so that Ruth, who had never seen her but had only heard rumors about her, cried out, “Your friend’s lovely!” and Ruth’s father, who taught mathematics at high school, said (clearing his throat), “It must be lonely staying in,” and our visitor said only, “Yes. Oh yes. It is,” resting one immensely long, thin, elegant hand on his shoulder like some kind of unwinking spider, while his words and hers went echoing out into the night, back and forth, back and forth, losing themselves in the trees that rushed past the headlights and massed blackly to each side.

“Ruth wants to join a circus!” cried Ruth’s mother, laughing.

“I do
not!"
said Ruth.

“You
will
not,” said her father.

“I’ll do exactly as I please,” said Ruth with her nose in the air, and she took a chocolate cream out of her handbag and put it in her mouth.

“You will
not!”
said Ruth’s father, scandalized.

“Daddy, you know I will too,” said Ruth, serenely though somewhat muffled, and under cover of the dark she wormed over to me in the back seat and passed, from her hot hand to mine, another chocolate cream. I ate it; it was unpleasantly and piercingly sweet.

“Isn’t it
glorious?”
said Ruth.

The Country Club was much more bare than I had expected, really only a big frame building with a veranda three-quarters of the way around it and not much lawn, but there was a path down front to two stone pillars that made a kind of gate and somebody had strung the gate and the whole path with colored Chinese lanterns. That part was lovely. Inside the whole first story was one room, with a varnished floor like the high school gym, and a punch table at one end and ribbons and Chinese lanterns hung all over the ceiling. It did not look quite like the movies but every thing was beautifully painted. I had noticed that there were wicker armchairs scattered on the veranda. I decided it was “nice.” Behind the punch table was a flight of stairs that led to a gallery full of tables where the grown-ups could go and drink (Ruth insisted they would be bringing real liquor for “mixes,” although of course the Country Club had to pretend not to know about that) and on both sides of the big room French windows that opened onto the veranda and the Chinese lanterns, swinging a little in the breeze. Ruth was wearing a better dress than mine. We went over to the punch table and drank punch while she asked me about our visitor and I made up a lot of lies. “You don’t know anything,” said Ruth. She waved across the room to some friends of hers; then I could see her start dancing with a boy in front of the band, which was at the other end of the room. Older people were dancing and people’s parents, some older boys and girls. I stayed by the punch table. People who knew my parents came over and talked to me; they asked me how I was and I said I was fine; then they asked me how my father was and I said he was fine. Someone offered to introduce me to someone but I said I knew him. I hoped somebody would come over. I thought I would skirt around the dance floor and try to talk to some of the girls I knew, but then I thought I wouldn’t; I imagined myself going up the stairs with Iris March’s lover from
The Green Hal
to sit at a table and smoke a cigarette or drink something. I stepped behind the punch table and went out through the French windows. Our guest was a few chairs away with her feet stretched out, resting on the lowest rung of the veranda. She was reading a magazine with the aid of a small flashlight. The flowers planted around the veranda showed up a little in the light from the Chinese lanterns: shadowy clumps and masses of petunias, a few of the white ones springing into life as she turned the page of her book and the beam of the flashlight moved in her hand. I decided I would have my cigarette in a long holder. The moon was coming up over the woods past the Country Club lawns, but it was a cloudy night and all I could see was a vague lightening of the sky in that direction. It was rather warm. I remembered something about
an ivory cigarette holder flaunting at the moon.
Our visitor turned another page. I thought that she must have been aware of me. I thought again of Iris March’s lover, coming out to get me on the “terrace” when somebody tapped me on the shoulder; it was Ruth’s father. He took me by the wrist and led me to our visitor, who looked up and smiled vaguely, dreamily, in the dark under the colored lanterns. Then Ruth’s father said:

“What do you know? There’s a relative of yours inside!” She continued to smile but her face stopped moving; she smiled gently and with tenderness at the space next to his head for the barely perceptible part of a moment. Then she completed the swing of her head and looked at him, still smiling, but everything had gone out of it. “How lovely,” she said. Then she said, “Who is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Ruth’s father, “but he’s tall, looks just like you—beg pardon. He says he’s your cousin.”

“
Por nada,
” said our guest absently, and getting up, she shook hands with Ruth’s father. The three of us went back inside. She left the magazine and flashlight on the chair; they seemed to belong to the Club. Inside, Ruth’s father took us up the steps to the gallery and there, at the end of it, sitting at one of the tables, was a man even taller than our visitor, tall even sitting down. He was in evening dress while half the men at the dance were in business suits. He did not really look like her in the face; he was a little darker and a little flatter of feature; but as we approached him, he stood up. He almost reached the ceiling. He was a giant. He and our visitor did not shake hands. The both of them looked at Ruth’s father, smiling formally, and Ruth’s father left us; then the stranger looked quizzically at me but our guest had already sunk into a nearby seat, all willowiness, all grace. They made a handsome couple. The stranger brought a silver-inlaid flask out of his hip pocket; he took the pitcher of water that stood on the table and poured some into a clean glass. Then he added whisky from the flask, but our visitor did not take it. She only turned it aside, amused, with one finger, and said to me, “Sit down, child,” which I did. Then she said: “Cousin, how did you find me?”

“Par
chance,
cousin,” said the stranger. “By luck.” He screwed the top back on the flask very deliberately and put the whole thing back in his pocket. He began to stir the drink he had made with a wooden muddler provided by the Country Club.

“I have endured much annoyance,” he said, “from that man to whom you spoke. There is not a single specialized here; they are all half-brained: scattered and stupid.”

“He is a kind and clever man,” said she. “He teaches mathematics.”

“The more fool he,” said the stranger, “for the mathematics he thinks he teaches!” and he drank his own drink. Then he said, “I think we will go home now.”

“Eh! This person?” said my friend, drawing up the ends of her lips half scornfully, half amused. “Not this person!”

“Why not this person, who knows me?” said the strange man. “Because,” said our visitor, and turning deliberately away from me, she put her face next to his and began to whisper mischievously in his ear. She was watching the dancers on the floor below, half the men in business suits, half the couples middle-aged. Ruth and Betty and some of their friends, and some vacationing college boys. The band was playing the fox-trot. The strange man’s face altered just a little, it darkened; he finished his drink, put it down, and then swung massively in his seat to face me.

“Does she go out?” he said sharply.

“Well?” said our visitor idly.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, she goes out. Every day.”

“By car or on foot?” I looked at her but she was doing nothing. Her thumb and finger formed a circle on the table.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Does she go on foot?” he said.

“No,” I blurted suddenly, “no, by car. Always by car!” He sat back in his seat.

“You would do anything,” he said conversationally. “The lot of you.”

“I?” she said. “I’m not dedicated. I can be reasoned with.” After a moment of silence he said, “We’ll talk.”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

“This gill’s home,” he said. “I’ll leave fifteen minutes after you. Give me your hand.”

“Why?” she said. “You know where I live. I am not going to hide in the woods like an animal.”

“Give me your hand,” he repeated. “For old time’s sake.” She reached across the table. They clasped hands and she winced momentarily. Then they both rose. She smiled dazzlingly. She took me by the wrist and led me down the stairs while the strange man called after us, as if the phrase pleased him, “For old time’s sake!” and then “Good health, cousin! Long life!” while the band struck up a march in ragtime. She stopped to talk to five or six people, including Ruth’s father who taught mathematics in the high school, and the band leader, and Betty, who was drinking punch with a boy from our class. Betty said to me under her breath. “Your daisies are coming loose. They’re gonna fall off.” We walked through the parked cars until we reached one that she seemed to like; they were all open and some owners left the keys in them; she got in behind the wheel and started up.

“But this
isn’t your car!”
I said. “You can’t just—”

“Get in!” I slid in next to her.

“It’s after ten o’clock,” I said. “You’ll wake up my father. Who-”

“Shut up!”

I did. She drove very fast and very badly. Halfway home she began to slow down. Then suddenly she laughed out loud and said very confidentially, not to me but as if to somebody else:

“I told him I had planted a Neilsen loop around here that would put half of Greene County out of phase. A dead man’s control. I had to go out and stop it every week.”

“What’s a Neilsen loop?” I said.

“Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today,” she quoted.

“What,” said I emphatically, “is a—”

“I’ve told you, baby,” she said, “and you’ll never know more, God willing,” and pulling into our driveway with a screech that would have wakened the dead, she vaulted out of the car and through the back door into the kitchen, just as if my mother and father had both been asleep or in a cataleptic trance, like those in the works of E. A. Poe. Then she told me to get the iron poker from the garbage burner in the back yard and find out if the end was still hot; when I brought the thing in, she laid the hot end over one of the flames of the gas stove. Then she rummaged around under the sink and came up with a bottle of my mother’s Clear Household Ammonia.

“That stuff’s awful,” I said. “If you let that get in your eyes—”

“Pour some in the water glass,” she said, handing it to me. “Two-thiids full. Cover it with a saucer. Get another glass and another saucer and put all of them on the kitchen table. Fill your mother’s water pitcher, cover that, and put that on the table.”

“Are you going to
drink
that?” I cried, horrified, halfway to the table with the covered glass. She merely pushed me. I got everything set up, and also pulled three chairs up to the kitchen table; I then went to turn off the gas flame, but she took me by the hand and placed me so that I hid the stove from the window and the door. She said, “Baby, what is the specific heat of iron?”

“What?” I said.

“You know it, baby,” she said. “What is it?”

I only stared at her.

“But you know it, baby,” she said. “You know it better than I. You know that your mother was burning garbage today and the poker would still be hot. And you know better than to touch the iron pots when they come fresh from the oven, even though the flame is off, because iron takes a long time to heat up and a long time to cool off, isn’t that so?”

I nodded.

“And you don’t know,” she added, “how long it takes for aluminum pots to become cold because nobody uses aluminum for pots yet. And if I told you how scarce the heavy metals are, and what a radionic oven is, and how the heat can go
through
the glass and the plastic and even the ceramic lattice, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about, would you?”

“No,” I said, suddenly frightened, “no, no, no.”

“Then you know more than some,” she said. “You know more than me. Remember how I used to burn myself, fiddling with your mother’s things?” She looked at her palm and made a face. “He’s coming,” she said. “Stand in front of the stove. When he asks you to turn off the gas, turn it off. When I say ‘Now,’ hit him with the poker.”

“I can’t,” I whispered. “He’s too big.”