“Becky hasn’t met him? She’s over here much oftener than I am.”
“He’s not around much,” said Gentian. She located the copper whisk that went with the saucepan; her father had put it in with the mixer attachments. She poured the water onto the cocoa and sugar and began beating them together. The rich dusty smell of the wetted cocoa made her realize how short her replies were being.
“And we don’t really know him,” she said.
“He acted as if he knew you,” said Erin.
Gentian turned on the burner under the saucepan of milk. “Yes, I know. He does that.”
“Steph would say that means he’s interested.”
This had occurred to Gentian also, but while she was sometimes good at fooling herself, being dishonest with Erin or Becky was not worth the comfort of self-foolery.
“He’s interested in everything and everybody, then,” she said. She put the pan of cocoa paste on the left front burner and turned on the flame, stirring briskly.
“The world’s his oyster?” said Erin.
“And he’s just waiting for the pearl to get big enough.”
“Don’t you like him?”
“You don’t,” said Gentian, stirring.
“He treated me like a girl.”
“You are a girl.”
“Yes?” said Erin. “So what’s your point?”
The milk was steaming. Erin didn’t care if it boiled, but Gentian disliked the way boiled milk behaved. She kept an eye on it. If Steph were here, she thought, I wouldn’t have to say this. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think you guys take feminism too far.”
“Excuse me?” said Erin.
Gentian picked up the saucepan of milk, put it down hastily, and groped for the oven glove. She poured the hot milk slowly into the cocoa paste, stirring it in pleasing swirls.
“I just meant,” she said, “that you don’t leave room for any— for any—courtship ritual,” she ended triumphantly, dredging the term out of a biology unit on birds that she and Erin had done last year. She put the empty saucepan down and went on stirring the cocoa.
“That,” said Erin, “was not courtship. That was dismissal from a position that I had not applied for.”
Gentian’s excavations in the bottom of the pan were no longer bringing up trails of darker brown. She gave the cocoa a few more stirs, turned off the gas, and got a couple of clean mugs out of the dishwasher. She filled them up, put the lid on the pan, and sat down across the table from Erin.
“No it wasn’t,” said Gentian. “It was just asking if you wanted to apply.” She got up again, fetched the canister of cinnamon out of the spice cupboard, and handed it to Erin.
“That’s no better,” said Erin, “but he was not asking if I wanted to apply. He was telling me I needn’t bother.”
“What was he telling me, then?” said Gentian.
“Send me your test scores and we’ll see,” said Erin, tapping cinnamon viciously into her mug.
“You make him sound like a college,” said Gentian.
Erin’s mouth softened, though she did not quite grin. “I bet he thinks of himself as one all right,” she said.
“Rosie thinks maybe he’s a drug dealer,” said Gentian.
Erin found Rosemary hard to take, but she did not greet this revelation with immediate derision. She drank her cocoa. “I don’t know what he’d need the drugs for,” she said.
“Income?” said Gentian.
“He doesn’t need to sell drugs to get money. All he has to do is to look cute.”
“That’s not the word I’d use,” said Gentian.
“Do you really want him?” said Erin.
“For what?” said Gentian, annoyed. “To go to the prom with? No. I don’t dance. I’d like to talk to him long enough to find out what he’s really like.”
“I could tell you that right now,” said Erin, “but you wouldn’t listen.”
Gentian got up and put their empty mugs into the sink, since the dishwasher was full of clean dishes.
“You can’t either,” she said.
“All right,” said Erin, standing up also and handing her the two saucepans. “He’s clever, self-centered, manipulative, very fond of his games, and doesn’t understand animals.”
“Want to bet?” said Gentian. And racist, she thought; either that, or he likes to cause trouble by taking up unpopular positions. You didn’t say anything about that.
“Sure,” said Erin. “What?”
Gentian ran cold water into the milk pan. “If you’re right, I’ll buy you any three patterns from the Folkways catalog,” she said, “and if I’m right, you’ll buy me and you those student discount tickets for any three plays at the Old Theater.”
“Oh, unkind,” said Erin. “It’s a deal.”
There was a brief pause.
“How do we tell?” said Gentian.
“Always practical,” said Erin. “I think it will be evident.”
“It has to be evident to both of us.”
“Fair enough.”
Gentian shrugged. She could see a colossal argument looming in that indefinite future where Dominic should have actually become an acquaintance, but Erin was the one who would have to prove her case. Any scientist was aware that one cannot prove a negative.
Chapter 13
Becky called on Saturday afternoon to find out if Gentian would mind her asking Erin to have dinner and spend the evening with them.
“Sure,” said Gentian. “We could just ask her to spend the night, too—I don’t have any super-private news.”
“I thought of that, but her mother doesn’t want her gone two nights in a row.”
“Okay, whatever.”
“When’s your lunar eclipse?”
“Sunday night. Well, Monday morning. Midnight-twenty-six.”
“Too bad it’s not tonight.”
“I know, it’s supposed to be clear as clear and very cold. Perfect conditions.”
“I meant you could bring the telescope over.”
“Well, it’s kind of cumbersome. And the moon’ll be in the south. I think there’s a house in the way. You could have come over here, if it was tonight.”
“It’d just be a pity if it suddenly stopped working for the eclipse.”
“I know, but it’s been fine.”
“Well, I’ll see you this evening.”
Erin was already there when Gentian arrived at Becky’s. Becky’s parents were going out, so the three of them got to have their supper on trays in Becky’s room, a great relief. Jeremy had to come eat with them—his baby-sitter wasn’t there yet—but he was, if less wonderful than Becky thought him, at least a perfectly reasonable child. He wanted to recite long passages of Dr. Seuss, but Erin could match him, so they had a pleasant enough time.
“Thanks for letting me crash your party,” Erin said to Gentian, when Becky had taken the trays and her brother downstairs, to keep him company until the baby-sitter arrived.
“It’s okay. Is something the matter?”
“Not exactly. I did want to talk to you guys.”
“You talked to me all day yesterday.”
“Yes, but I wanted to talk to both of you.”
“Is this Giant Ant business?”
“Yes,” said Erin, in a tone that did not encourage further questions.
“Tell me what you’ve been reading,” said Gentian.
Erin had been reading The Origin of Species, Rock ’n’ Roll Summer, Weetzie Bat, The Night Gift, The Giver, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and Morphogenesis.
Gentian inquired respectfully after all the ones she had not read. Before she became an astronomer, she too had read as copiously and voraciously as Erin. She had even looked in astronomical catalogs for the special filter that, according to the Mushroom Planet books, would allow her to see Basidium through a telescope. She should remember how much there was to read, the next time she was balked by the weather. The alternative seemed to be to get seriously to work on
mathematics— Maria Mitchell had been a brilliant mathematician—and she did not want to face that just now. Besides, there were computers these days, which ought to make some sort of difference. She had to learn to use a camera with the telescope, too, and it seemed standard for astronomers to develop their own pictures. Well, nineteenth-century ones, anyway. Professional ones today didn’t necessarily do that.
“You’re woolgathering again,” said Erin.
“Sorry. Is The Night Gift as good as Moonflash?”
Becky came back, having handed Jeremy over to the babysitter, and put in the middle of the bed a tin of chocolate-chip cookies, one of Chinese sausage rolls, and one of pancakes stuffed with spinach, potatoes, and cauliflower.
“Now,” she said to Erin, “what’s up?”
“Alma thinks you’re avoiding her.”
“Alma?” said Gentian. “I thought you were going to say Steph thought so.”
“Steph knows you are and figures everything will be fine when she unveils her Plan, whatever it is.”
“I’m not avoiding Alma, truly.”
“She says she knows you think she moved the planchette, because you’re a materialist, and if it moved one of us must have moved it, and she’s the obvious candidate.”
Gentian snorted. “Only Alma would think she’s the obvious candidate. She doesn’t know the meaning of stealth.”
“She says your friend says you think she did it.”
“What friend?”
“Come on, Genny.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t get it.”
“She said you’d know, and after yesterday I know too.”
Dominic?” said Gentian. “I’ll kill him. I never told him anything of the sort—and I bet he didn’t say anything straight out to Alma, either, he wouldn’t know how. He just made her think that was what he meant.”
“Is that somehow better?” said Erin.
“Not if he did it on purpose, but I don’t know if he did.” Of course he did, and why was she defending him?
“Does she think I think so too?” said Becky.
“She thinks you’re avoiding her out of loyalty to Genny.”
“I bet Dominic insinuated that, too,” said Gentian. She jumped off the bed. “I’d better call Alma, right now. Can I use the phone?”
“She’s at Steph’s.”
“Oh, great, the chance of getting through is about like the chance of discovering a comet with binoculars.”
“What would a comet want with binoculars?” said Becky. Gentian stuck out her tongue and dialed Steph’s number. Sure enough, the line was busy.
“Just as well,” said Gentian, returning to the bed and taking a handful of cookies. “She’s so stubborn, we’ll need a plan.”
“I’m upset with Alma,” said Becky. “Why did she believe Dominic, and why didn’t she talk to us?”
“Because it’s a scientific issue, or a religious one, I think,” said Erin, appropriating the tin of sausage rolls. “She thinks her defense is something you won’t believe in, so she’s screwed.”
“She’s a bonehead, is what she is,” said Gentian. “Her defense is that she’s honest and we know it.”
“But what happened on Halloween, then?”
“How should I know? I keep an open mind. I haven’t got a hypothesis.”
“I think you’d better, before you talk to Alma.”
“Well, I haven’t, what am I supposed to do, make one up?”
“I think you’d better.”
“No, wait, that’s silly,” said Becky. “Let’s just test Alma’s hypothesis. No, I mean, let’s test what she thinks Gentian’s hypothesis is.”
“What?” said Erin.
“Yes!” said Gentian. “We’ll have another seance without Alma and see what happens. If the planchette goes crazy—oh, gosh, I’ll have to get another one, that one’s just about disintegrated—then we’ll have proved she didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“What if nothing happens?” said Erin.
“Then we’ll have to wait for next Halloween when the conditions are similar and maybe by then she won’t be such a bone-head.”
“I guess it’s worth a try,” said Erin, dubiously.
“It’s not a proper controlled experiment,” said Gentian, “but it will—it will—demonstrate our confidence in her, don’t you think? And I bet the four of us will find something just as weird happening. I really don’t have a hypothesis, but I bet it’s just us, because we’ve been together so long and know how one another think. Thinks? What’s wrong with that sentence?”
“Steph won’t stand for it,” said Becky, not only refusing the grammatical question but perpetrating an ambiguous response.
Gentian was sure that Becky was aware of this, and while she couldn’t help smiling, she decided not to say anything about it. “Well,” she said, answering what Becky meant rather than what she said, as Becky was always being asked to do by other people, “nobody thinks Steph did it, so she doesn’t have to be there.”
“I’m not sure that’s a very scientific assertion,” said Erin.
“I don’t care about being scientific, I don’t see how you can be about something like a ouija board anyway. I just want to make Alma stop thinking we think she did it.”
“Put a big red mark on the calendar,” said Erin to Becky. “Gentian has just said that she doesn’t care about being scientific.”
“To be accurate,” said Gentian, “I don’t think it applies to the situation.” Her mother had said that the year her father took in a pregnant dog and offered to build a kennel in the back yard.
Gentian called Steph’s house again, and got a busy signal again. They settled down to play Scrabble, trying Steph’s number again between games. Erin won two, and they had to outlaw two-letter words and speak to her very sternly, but she finally entered into the spirit of things in the third and produced “androgyne,” while Becky triumphed with “Alexandria.” Gentian managed, even in her distraction, to uphold her dignity by spelling “Xanthippe” in the fourth game, where the best Becky could do was “settlement” and Erin tried to make “prestidigitation” and left out two syllables.
By then they had decided not to call Alma at Steph’s after all because it would mean they could not conceal from Steph the plan to have another seance. Possibly Alma would not agree to concealment anyway, but she could not be expected to take a long, agitated telephone call at Steph’s house and not tell her what it was all about. Gentian would call Alma tomorrow when she woke up.
Becky’s parents came back, and gave Erin a ride home when they took the baby-sitter. Gentian and Becky sat and looked at one another over the Scrabble board and the empty tins.
“I think you’d better tell me about Dominic,” said Becky.
Gentian had been expecting the question, and had even framed several answers. She found it remarkably hard to begin. It was like revealing something you had promised to keep a secret. She had to eat two cookies and drink half a glass of milk before she could manage. Becky sat watching her with a vaguely anxious expression.
“All right. Well. He doesn’t say things straight out,” said Gentian. “He uses a lot of quotations and he is the absolute king of the non sequitur. He makes my father look like the most linear thinker in the entire universe. So it’s not exactly easy to figure out what he’s getting at. He insinuates things, or you think he might be; and if you ask him what he means, he just quotes something else or changes the subject again.”
“I can’t imagine why anybody puts up with him.”
He’s beautiful, thought Gentian. But it wasn’t just that. If he were stupid or banal rather than perplexing, he might be nice to look at but she would not continually want to talk to him. “Well,” she said. “It’s a little like a computer game, maybe. No, that’s not what I mean. Like a puzzle. No, not that either.”
“Erin’s met him?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll ask her.”
“She didn’t
like him.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“At least I know I like Micky.”
“Oh, gosh, yes, you went to a movie yesterday. How was it?”
“Mixed,” said Becky. “Definitely mixed. We did go see Henry V, and he just hated it.”
“Why?”
“Well, he doesn’t really like Shakespeare at all, but he thought, if you had to do Shakespeare, you shouldn’t do it that way.”
“I don’t see what right he has to an opinion of how to stage something he doesn’t like.”
“Well, there is that.”
“So what was the good part?”
“Well, some of that was. We had a good argument. And I liked trying to figure out how he thought. And he does have a sense of humor, and he likes Emily Dickinson, so he’s not totally devoid of literary taste.”
“It’s the same thing,” said Gentian. “It’s the same reason I keep talking to Dominic. It’s a puzzle. You want to know how somebody can think like that.”
“That’s how I feel about Steph,” said Becky. “Except that we’ve known her longer and we know she’s smart and sensitive and thoughtful and laughs when you don’t expect it.”
“And she won’t let you down,” said Gentian.
They looked at each other.
“Yes, that’s what we don’t know yet about Micky and Dominic.”
“What else did you do?”
“We went to Lac Vien and argued about food, and then we walked along the river and argued about nature, and then we went to the movie, and my dad picked us up and we argued about how to get to Micky’s house.”
“Wow. I didn’t know you liked to argue so much.”
“I don’t know if I’d like it all the time.”
“Do you guys agree about anything except Emily Dickinson?”
“That we like to argue.”
“Great.”
“It beats never saying anything right out and upsetting Alma.”
“It’s not the same thing. I’m not going out with Dominic.”