Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

  Gentian decided not to answer any of the messages right now, but she did mark them unread, in case she needed them later. Then she went upstairs, thinking of the dazzling clarity of the sky tonight. She looked at the spot where the telescope had been, and did her homework. The moon was waxing, anyway, and it had risen at 3: 50 in the afternoon and would not set until almost three in the morning. And clouds were coming in. And Mercury and Mars were too close to the sun to be seen just now.

  On Tuesday it snowed in northern Minnesota and was cloudy everywhere. Gentian retired early and reread her biography of Maria Mitchell for comfort.

  On Wednesday it cleared up, and Gentian got out the binoculars again, but the relief of being able to do some astronomy, any astronomy, was beginning to wear off. There was not much to look at except Saturn, anyway, which was much better through the telescope.

  Thursday it snowed in central Minnesota, though not very hard. Gentian was already feeling gloomy on her way to school, when Alma pounced on her as she climbed the steps and said, even more breathlessly than usual, “Can I talk to you? Without anybody else?”

  “Sure,” said Gentian, considering her with some alarm. Becky always said that Alma had cheerful bones, and it was true that her resting expression even during essay exams in English, her weakest subject, was merely alert and interested; but she looked far from cheerful at the moment. “What disposable classes have you got?”

  “Oh, all of ’em. When’re yours?”

  “Second period. Where?”

  “Oh, the library, I guess.”

  “Okay.” They went up the steps and headed for assembly. “Are things okay at home?” said Gentian cautiously.

  “What? Oh, yeah, fine. This is just personal.”

  “Are you mad at Steph?”

  “What? No. You want me to get a note from her?”

  “Has Becky been talking to you?”

  “What?”

  “She thinks the Giant Ants are not cohering as we should.”

  “We what—oh, never mind. Just wait till I can tell you, all right?”

  “All right, all right,” said Gentian.

  The library was one of Gentian’s favorite places in the school, probably second only to the art room. It was not like her idea of a library, being sunny and airy and full of steel shelving, but it had tables, chairs, cushions, and a great many books, as well as a librarian who put a shelf of banned books right at the entrance with notices exhorting one to read them.

  Gentian paused to see if there were any new ones. She found the Newbery Award a better guide to what was good to read; as Becky said, some banned books were boring, some were absurd, and some were contemptible, but she didn’t see why somebody else should decide any of those things. But if a book had won a Newbery and had also been challenged or banned, it was almost always worth a look.

  Alma came hurrying in, her earrings dancing, and beckoned Gentian into a far corner full of cushions. They sank down and regarded one another.

  “Is Dominic a good friend of yours?” said Alma.

  “He only moved in in September,” said Gentian, “and I’ve only talked to him once or twice.”

  “Do you want him to be a good friend of yours?”

  Yes, thought Gentian. “How can I tell until I know him better?”

  “There’s something the matter with him,” said Alma.

  Gentian thought wildly of diabetes, heart conditions, leukemia. “What?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s stupid or if he’s crazy or if he’s a troublemaker.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He never said it, but he talked like you guys only put up with me—”

  “What?”

  “—because it made you feel so liberal.”

  “Did you tell him who founded the Giant Ants, for God’s sake?”

  “Nope. I’m not telling him anything. I don’t want him to know anything about us.”

  “But if it was just a misunderstanding—”

  “He didn’t misunderstand, he assumed. And then he sympathized. And then he—he never said anything right out, do you get that, he hinted around—he gave me to understand,” said Alma, precisely, “that he had experienced racial prejudice himself and that therefore we had a lot in common.”

  “Well, I guess he might have. I don’t know where he’s—oh. He said he was from the South.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well—he said south of here, anyway.”

  “I don’t care if he was raised by penguins and they pitied him because he didn’t have a tuxedo,” said Alma.

  Gentian laughed, despite the mix of awful sensations warring in her middle.

  “You know what was worst?” said Alma. “He was being nice. He just knew he was being nice to me and of course I’d love to hear all about it. If you hadn’t come down the driveway I’d have—”

  “Alma. How’d he know about us? You’re the only one he’s met.”

  “No kidding? I don’t know. I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “That’s very weird.”

  “He’s very weird,” said Alma.

  “I thought weird was good,” said Gentian, quoting a maxim of the Giant Ants from the fourth grade, when one of Steph’s ordinary friends had asked her why she liked to talk to weird people like Alma and Erin. Gentian thought that was when Steph and Alma’s firm friendship dated from, but she wasn’t sure.

  “‘There’s nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so. ’”

  “You said that was a pernicious doctrine.”

  “Well, it is. I just meant we’re using two different meanings of ‘weird. ’”

  “Well, yeah, I guess we are.”

  “It’s something like the difference between nonconformist and spooky. Dominic is spooky.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” said Gentian.

  “Sure. Oh, and I should warn you: Steph has a Plan.”

  “Uh-oh. Did she tell you what it is?”

  “No; she said she’d tell us sometime before Thanksgiving.”

  “Is it a winter plan?”

  “Dunno. She’s not dropping hints this time.”

  “Wow.”

  “I trust the rest of you all to sit on her if necessary.”

  “Okay, I’ll alert the troops.”

  Alma went away to catch the last part of her math class, and Gentian sat on in the sun, musing on what it meant to be weird, and what it meant to be spooky. Maybe I’m attracted to spooky boys, she thought. Who else is spooky? Well, I don’t like vampires. She brooded. Do I like Dominic? The way I like Jamie? Yes and no, she decided. Much better to stick to astronomy.

  Friday it snowed, in a desultory and absent way, as if it might forget to stop, ever. Gentian’s father had called the telescope store in the afternoon, and greeted Gentian when she got home from school with the news that Josh was over his flu and was looking at the telescope, but was very puzzled about it.

  Becky called after supper while Gentian was worrying, and asked her to spend the night on Saturday. Gentian agreed, and then complained at length about the telescope. “There’s a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter on November eighth and one of Mercury and Venus with Jupiter very nearby on the fourteenth and there’s a lunar eclipse on the twenty-ninth and I have got to have a telescope.”

  “What about the binoculars?”

  “They’re better than nothing but they’re not the same at all.”

  “You know what you could do,” said Becky, “if they continue to be stymied. You could get the telescope back and bring it over here and see how it works here.”

  “Oh, that’s an idea. Except—oh, hell, they’re all in the southeast and you’ve got that hill.”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry. Well, you know, taking the telescope somewhere and seeing if it works better there is still a good idea.”

  “And soon,” said Gentian, “so I don’t get out in the middle of nowhere the night of the first conjunction and find out it
still doesn’t work. I wish I could drive.”

  “What planets is it again?”

  “Venus and Jupiter first and then Mercury and Venus with Jupiter pretty close.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Well, it’s not spectacularly rare, but it’s unusual.”

  “I meant mythologically,” said Becky. She giggled suddenly. “You should call Erin.”

  “Why? She’s right down in a valley, you can’t see anything from her house at all.”

  “Well, I always thought, if men are from Mars and women are from Venus—”

  “That’s a stupid book.”

  “—then Erin must be from Mercury.”

  “We’re all from right here,” said Gentian, “unfortunately.”

  “But she’d probably like to be from Mercury. You call her; it’s your joke.”

  “You call her,” said Becky. “I bet you haven’t yet, have you?”

  “Well, no.”

  “I promise I won’t mention it again,” said Becky. “But I wish you would.”

  “I don’t have anything against it,” said Gentian, irritably. “I’ll see you tomorrow around seven.” She tapped her finger sharply on the hook and, getting the dial tone, dialed Erin’s number.

  Eileen answered; Gentian could hear the baby yelling in the background. She asked for Erin. Eileen said she would get her; in the meantime, Erica, Erin’s younger sister, said, “Hello?” and engaged Gentian in a long monologue about how Erin would not lend Erica a particular red jacket that they had previously agreed would be shared equally between them. Erin’s mother interrupted this to tell Erica to go change the baby, Eileen came back to say Erin would be right there, and finally Erin said temperately, “Yes?” Her voice was a register lower than anybody else’s in the family, and she seemed generally to live at a much slower tempo. Gentian had seen this exasperate the rest of them almost to tears, but she mostly found it soothing.

  “Hi,” she said, “it’s me.”

  “Oh, gosh, you beat me to it,” said Erin.

  “I did?”

  “Becky has been at work.”

  “Oh, good grief.”

  “Yes, well. Do you want to go to the Planetarium?”

  “Oh, that’s an idea. When?”

  “I thought the Friday after Thanksgiving. I’ll need to get out of this menagerie,” said Erin, raising her voice against renewed childish shrieks.

  “I’ll need to get out of mine, too. Do you want to spend the night afterwards? We can hide upstairs.”

  “I’ll ask Mom and get back to you.”

  “Oh, and make a note on your calendar for November fourteenth, if it’s clear in the morning, to look at the southeastern sky at about six-fifteen. There’s a conjunction of Venus and Mercury, with Jupiter close by.”

  “Don’t they get along as a rule?” said Erin.

  Gentian sighed.

  “Hey, count your blessings. Becky would have asked you something grammatical.”

  “Actually, she didn’t.”

  “No? Oh, well. Okay, I’ll look; and I’ll call you back when I’ve talked to Mom.”

  Gentian hung up, filled with virtue, and turned on the weather radio again, just in case they should have decided to say there was a one hundred percent chance of clear skies on Saturday. They temporized, as usual. It really didn’t matter; the moon was almost full, which made finding anything else problematic, especially with binoculars; but she couldn’t help checking.

  Gentian thought she would go have another look at the attic. She took her flashlight from the drawer of her bedside table and went out into the hall. Maria Mitchell leapt up the steps, bounded between Gentian’s legs, and sat down before the door to the attic, looking expectant.

  “Oh, all right,” said Gentian. She turned on the hall light, unlocked the square door, and left the door open.

  It was certainly a huge space. Well, it covered the whole front half of the house, except for the sunrooms. Gentian shone the flashlight on the walls on either side, which were finished up to the point where they met the roof. Her father was right. Her mother had put in the wiring for a grounded outlet every three feet, although she had only put in four or five of the outlets themselves. Gentian remembered running in and out of the attic while her mother was doing the work, occasionally bringing her a Coke or feeding a wire down inside the wall for her, if her father was busy. They could certainly do any reasonable science project here, even if Dominic wanted to bring in a computer. How likely any science project of Dominic’s was to be reasonable was a separate question.

  Depending on how large a space he needed, one of the two finished rooms might be better. They had overhead lights already.

  Gentian went along to the first of these, which was halfway to the front of the house on her left. This was the one Rosie had lived in when she was angry, and the things she had drawn on the wall were still there. Maria Mitchell came tearing in from the hallway, ran up to Rosie’s drawing of her, and rubbed her whiskers against it.

  “Clever cat,” said Gentian, and went to look at the other room. This was where she and Junie had hidden from Rosie when Rosie was a toddler. They had brought their dollhouses and the model train and the castle and the lead soldiers up here, and the books they didn’t want Rosie to tear up, and the art projects they didn’t want her to spoil. Gentian had done watercolor paintings of spaceships, supernovae, the galactic core, the moons of Jupiter, comets hitting the Sun, Maria Mitchell (the astronomer) discovering comets with her two-inch telescope, the Big Bang, and Susan B. Anthony hitting politicians in top hats over the head with signs saying resistance to tyranny is obedience to god and no taxation without representation.

  Juniper would sit across the old painted kitchen table from her and write and write and write. If they were mad at their parents or annoyed with Rosie, she would write the incidents up and read aloud to Gentian what she had written.

  “Huh,” said Gentian.

  Maria Mitchell came trotting into the room with something in her mouth. Gentian dived for her, missed, hurriedly shut the door, and lay down on the floor to get a better look. It was a grimy calico mouse, not a real one. Murr was acting as if the catnip in it still had some zing, which was improbable. Gentian sat on the dusty boards, watching Murr roll around and rub the mouse against her cheek, and wondered when she and Junie had stopped having any friendly relations. They had always argued furiously. They didn’t really do that much any more; it was more like an automated program, with little real content.

  Gentian didn’t think it had been her fault. Junie had started shutting herself up in her room all the time. Their parents had had several irritable conversations during which one or the other of them would recite or read from some book or article the signs of impending teenage suicide, and the other would snap that these were virtually indistinguishable from the simple signs of teenage existence. Then they would draw straws for who went to talk to Junie, and whoever lost would emerge in fifteen minutes or so looking harried.

  All this had happened before Gentian got the telescope, when she was trying to make her own. By the time she had given that up and decided to use all her savings and all her potential Christmas presents to buy one, Juniper had emerged from her chrysalis of despair the cranky, touchy, energetic, clothing-obsessed, sister-hating creature she was today.

  “Huh,” said Gentian. “Wow.” She listened to herself, and laughed. “When Daddy talks to himself,” she informed her cat, “he at least uses complete sentences.”

  The cranky Juniper had always existed, she decided; it was just that in the past three years or so, that one had taken over Juniper’s life at home. The teen echo could have that one, as far as Gentian was concerned; but no, it got the good one.

  Gentian picked up Maria Mitchell in one hand and the damp catnip mouse in the other and went back to her part of the attic. Here she leafed morosely through several copies of Sky and Telescope. There was a great deal to being an astronomer besides using a telescop
e, but somehow she could not get around the lack of one.

  Chapter 9

  Saturday was cold. Sunday, which was Halloween, was forecast to be even colder, in the teens, a temperature that one welcomed gratefully in February after a bout of daily high temperatures below zero, but that in October caused an escalating series of arguments between Juniper and Rosemary and their mother about the suitability of their Halloween costumes.

  The Giant Ants did not go trick-or-treating, except early in the evening with any sibling under the age of five whom one or the other might be saddled with. The Giant Ants had costume parties at which they ate exactly the kind of candy they liked and played charades. Sometimes they invited other people, but mostly they didn’t. This year the party was at Gentian’s, and Gentian’s mother kept trying to persuade Juniper and Rosemary that they would just as soon stay home and join Gentian’s friends as go traipsing around in freezing winds dressed, respectively, as Hamlet with his doublet all unbraced and Mary Lou Retton.

  “Mom,” said Gentian, cornering her mother in the kitchen at a moment when Juniper was appealing to their father in his study and Rosemary was sulking upstairs, “I don’t want them at the Giant Ants’ party. We won’t be able to talk about anything important if they’re there.”

  Her mother was emptying the dishwasher so fast that Gentian didn’t dare help for fear of being stepped on. She said, “You know, for the past two or three years all my parenting energy has gone into keeping you girls out of one another’s way and protecting you from the terrors of one another’s presence. I’m about out of patience with it.”

  “They don’t want to come to our party anyway.”

  “I’m aware of that,” said her mother, dryly. “You would probably get more points for pretending you’d love to have them and heaving a surreptitious sigh of relief when I am utterly unable to persuade them to stay home.”