Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

  “I couldn’t invite him anyway,” said Gentian. “He hasn’t got a phone.”

  “Maybe Erin could invite Brent.”

  “There’s no point in trying to make it all come out even. We are not all double stars in this constellation.”

  “I’d have said you and I were a double star,” said Becky, disconsolately.

  “Sure. Micky’s just a comet you’ve captured and Dominic is, oh, a comet I haven’t captured, but he’s come under my gravitational influence for the time being.”

  Becky laughed, as if in spite of herself. “I’ll call Alma and ask if it’s okay.”

  Gentian hung up the phone and sat there, thinking. She herself had been behaving just as usual, so Becky’s disconsolation must stem from something in Becky’s feelings; she must be finding that thoughts of Micky somehow crowded Gentian out of her mind. What does that mean, in the long run? she thought. Will she not sit by me at the party, or not talk to me, or what? Maybe it won’t matter. I get very concentrated on Dominic sometimes too, but it’s just temporary. It wouldn’t interfere with anything important. She almost called Becky up and told her so, except that the line would be busy while Becky was talking to Alma. Besides, another thought was intruding. She sat absently rubbing Murr’s belly for a while, and then went downstairs and found her father in his office.

  He called, “Come in!” when she knocked. He was sitting at his computer, playing solitaire.

  “Daddy,” said Gentian, not apologizing for the interruption, since he obviously was not working, “remember you said Mom would be more upset if you brought home another dog than if you brought home a mistress?”

  “Ah,” said her father. “I wondered when that would go in.”

  “Well, are you planning to?”

  “Bring home another dog? No. I don’t plan them. They just happen.”

  “Dad.”

  “I don’t think I could,” said her father reflectively. “We haven’t got a bedroom to spare. You couldn’t put a mistress in the sewing room, could you?”

  “Dad. "

  “No, Gentian, I am not planning to bring home a mistress. I will even go so far as to say that I do not have a mistress, although I’m not sure it would be any of your business if I did, unless I were planning to bring her home.”

  “Would it be Mom’s business? Even if you weren’t planning to bring her home?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “What about you? Are you planning to bring somebody home? We’ll look as respectable as we ever do, I assure you. No unaccounted-for adults cluttering up the place. Just the usual ration.”

  “Just the usual double-star system,” said Gentian, slowly.

  “Are they usual?”

  “Well, multiple-star systems are, I’m pretty sure. I’m not sure about doubles as opposed to triples or whatever.”

  “You can bring two people home if you like,” said her father, equably. “Just warn us so we can put some water in the soup.” He was in a skittish mood; there wasn’t much point in talking to him any longer.

  “Thanks,” said Gentian, and went out.

  “Are you turning into a teenager?” her father shouted after her.

  Gentian did not deign to answer.

  Chapter 18

  The day of New Year’s Eve was warm, seventeen degrees above the average high, which meant it was just below freezing. Gentian set off for the party, therefore, without a great deal of astronomical regret; the seeing would probably not be good until the weather settled more.

  She was the first one there, and Alma was still getting dressed. She was informed of these facts by Alma’s brother Duane, who was ten; he was the one who owned the hamsters. She consented to go see them, and to let them climb up her arm and burrow inside her sweater, and to exercise them by letting them walk from one hand into the other and then putting the first hand in front of them so that they walked onto that, all without going anywhere.

  “I feel that way sometimes too,” she said to the one she was holding. It climbed busily onto her other hand, nose working, whiskers twitching. Gentian wondered why Lewis Carroll had not had a hamster rather than a Red Queen.

  Alma came and fetched her presently and took her down to the basement recreation room where Alma entertained her friends. She was wearing a brilliant red caftan, red ballet shoes, and red earrings. Gentian resigned herself to feeling like a sartorial barbarian for the rest of the evening. She had completely forgotten that she had a new white silk shirt and a red jumper in her closet. Well, her jeans were clean and she had washed her hair.

  Becky arrived next, and took off her jacket to reveal a vivid orange skirt, a dark green sweater, a yellow scarf around her waist, red socks, and, once she had taken her boots off, purple slippers.

  “Becky, we clash,” said Alma.

  “Good,” said Becky. “You look very elegant.”

  Alma told them to keep one another company, and went to supervise whatever was happening in the kitchen. Her brothers tagged along, despite threats on her part to kill them if they touched anything before everyone else arrived. Becky took a folded piece of paper out of the pocket of her skirt and handed it to Gentian.

  “Read this before the rest of them get here,” she said.

  It was a poem in three verses, called “Betelgeuse on a Winter’s Night.” The verses were sonnets. The first was about how Becky had felt waiting for Gentian to come back, the night she suggested Gentian try the binoculars. The second was about the time Gentian showed her the double star Albireo through the telescope, and the third was about all the arguments she and Micky had had. When she had read them, Gentian turned the paper over, to see what the conclusion might be, but the three verses were all there was. She read them again. They all had certain things in them: the colors of Gentian’s room, of Albireo’s stars, of the sky and the sun when she was walking with Micky; the cold of the balcony and of Gentian’s room when she was stargazing and of the park where Becky had walked with Micky. They had recurring phrases. But she could not fit them together. She thought they were all good, especially the one about Albireo, but she could not see how they made a whole.

  She said so, reluctantly.

  “I know,” said Becky. “I might fiddle with them some more or I might just let them alone. They’re as connected as I can make them. I wrote about five different last verses and they just didn’t work.”

  “You know you’re always sorry when you try to finish things before they’re ready.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Maybe you’re too nervous because Micky is coming.”

  “I am fairly nervous. How am I supposed to act? Who am I supposed to sit by? What if everybody hates him? He’s going to argue with them, he always does. He argued with my mother about how to make chocolate pudding.”

  “What did she think?”

  “That he was cute. And how nice that a boy should take an interest in cooking.”

  “Maybe the Giant Ants will think he’s cute too.”

  Becky made a grimace, eloquent of exactly what Gentian could not tell, and Erin came in with Steph. Erin was wearing leggings and a very large sweater, which made her look remarkably like Viola dressed as a boy. Steph had a broomstick skirt made in tiers of different materials, over black leggings and a black leotard. She looked extremely pretty, but then she always did.

  “Where’s Micky?” said Erin to Becky. “Did you leave him to make his way here all alone?”

  Becky stuck out her tongue. “Where’s Brent?”

  “Visiting his grandmother, as usual on New Year’s.” Erin sat down on the floor. “Well, at least now I know that. He looked completely blank when I asked him.”

  “Is Dominic coming?” said Steph to Gentian.

  Gentian refrained from sticking her own tongue out, and said, “He hasn’t got a telephone and I haven’t seen him.”

  “You could have dropped him a note.”

  “He doesn’t get l
etters,” said Gentian.

  Alma came in with a huge tray of fresh fruit and vegetables, and Steph sprang up to help her. Erin gave Gentian an odd look but said nothing. Becky said quietly to Gentian, “What does that mean?”

  “The post office thinks the house isn’t there.”

  “Maybe they should talk to your telescope next time.” Gentian giggled.

  “Are you saying,” said Steph, returning, “that Micky is going to be the only boy here?”

  “He’s used to it,” said Becky. “He’s got three sisters.”

  The doorbell rang. Alma ran upstairs and could be heard arguing with Duane in the upstairs hallway. Becky sat where she was, but her eyes got big.

  “Some of Duane and Peter’s friends are coming, too,” said Erin quietly. “Alma says she’ll put them in the living room.” Footsteps sounded on the basement steps, and Alma came down with Micky. He had grown since Gentian last paid him any mind, but he was basically the same, a very nice study in shades of brown, with his dark curly hair and big brown eyes and pale brown skin. He was thin and sharp-featured and restless-looking. At the moment he also looked apprehensive, like Becky. His eyes glanced off everybody else; then he found her and grinned. Becky didn’t grin back, but she did stand up and go to meet him. They were just the same height, but Becky could have beat him at wrestling. Alma vanished upstairs again, and Becky brought Micky over to where Gentian and Erin and Steph were sitting.

  “I think you’ve all met before,” said Becky, “but it was a long time ago. Micky Adomaitis, Gentian Meriweather, Erin Kerr, Steph Thornton.”

  “Erin’s in my study group,” said Micky.

  Trust Erin to say nothing whatsoever about that to anybody. “And I think I remember the rest of you from the butterfly incident.”

  “Except Steph,” said Erin. “They sent her to the wrong school that year.”

  “It was actually a good school,” said Micky. “My baby sister liked it.”

  “It was okay,” said Steph, “but I didn’t know anybody.”

  “It wasn’t as good as the open school, anyway,” said Gentian. “Awfully regimented.”

  “I didn’t mind much,” said Steph. “At the time I wanted to join the Navy, so I liked being terribly rule-bound.”

  “Regimentation is better for most people,” said Micky. “Especially kids, who tend to be flighty.”

  “Your sisters are flighty,” said Becky. “Don’t overgeneralize.” She sounded just as she might when chiding Gentian or Erin for something they had been doing since the second grade. How does that happen so fast, thought Gentian.

  “I’m a scientist,” said Micky. “I have to generalize. You’re a poet; you have to be specific.”

  There was a brief confounded pause as every one of the Giant Ants present gathered herself to contradict him. Becky, who after all had had more practice, got in first.

  “I have to be specific because that’s the kind of poet I am,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with poetry. Lots of poets generalize. Look at Alexander Pope.”

  “And science has to be specific,” said Erin. “It’s made up of specifics.”

  “The whole purpose of science is to discover general rules,” said Micky.

  “Yes,” said Gentian, “but not by making them up out of too few examples.”

  “What do you mean, yes?” said Erin. “That is not the whole purpose of science; science is too big to have a whole purpose.”

  “Now you know how I feel,” said Steph, “when one of you starts going on about how the whole purpose of religion is this or that.”

  “The whole purpose of religion is to keep people from thinking for themselves,” said Micky.

  “You might just as well say that’s the whole purpose of science,” said Steph. “It comes to exactly the same thing. Religion really does say it knows general rules and tells you what they are.”

  “Not—” began Erin.

  “Don’t start on Eastern mysticism. Refusing to have a general rule is just as much a general rule as having one.”

  Gentian looked at Becky, to see how she was taking this. Becky did not look overly alarmed. Gentian thought she herself might be more alarmed than Becky. She did not want to talk about science with a stranger, and was a little surprised that Steph would so readily engage in a discussion of religion, which was her science, with somebody she hardly knew.

  Then again, Steph had odd notions of what privacy was.

  “That’s logically true,” said Micky, “but—”

  Alma burst upon them with her arms full of CDs, and made Micky and Steph help her choose five to put in the changer.

  “Was that a rescue?” said Gentian to Becky.

  “I don’t know; the rescuer and the rescuee may be one and the same. Alma hates arguments.”

  “Rescuee?”

  “Sorry. I’m all about in my head.”

  “What else is anybody all about?”

  “What’s got into you?”

  “Just taking up the slack you’re leaving.”

  “Hoist with my own petard,” said Becky.

  “Are you sorry he came?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, at least nobody will be able to tease you about him. Or me about Dominic.”

  “How is Dominic?”

  “I have no idea. He came and put huge quantities of stuff in the attic, to build the time machine out of, but he hasn’t been back. I wonder if they’re away for the holidays. There’s no way to tell, the house looks as if nobody lives in it anyway.”

  “But the lawn’s always cut and there’s no snow on the sidewalk, and there aren’t those little newspapers that always pile up when people go away.”

  “No, that’s true. It doesn’t look neglected, but it doesn’t look lived in, either.”

  “Gentian. Did you say ‘time machine’?”

  “Mommy, that man said ‘time machine’ to himself,” said Gentian.

  Becky acknowledged the joke with a smile, but kept on looking expectant.

  “Well, yes. That’s his science project. He wants to build a time machine.”

  “Is that scientifically feasible?”

  “I don’t really know; I haven’t taken physics yet. What I think is that it might be theoretically possible but for a couple of kids to build it in an attic is very unlikely.”

  “Like all those books about building a moon rocket in your back yard,” said Becky. “So, if it’s not scientifically interesting, why are you helping?”

  “Well, because Dominic is scientifically interesting. I think helping him on something like this will tell me what I want to know about him.” And give me a chance to make an impression on him, she added silently.

  “You’re an astronomer, not a psychologist,” said Becky.

  “Well, I have to live with people, don’t I?”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, not really. Maria Mitchell didn’t have to live with many of them, and she didn’t get along with any of the boneheads at all. But I have to live with me, anyway, and I seem to be fascinated by Dominic.”

  “Flawlessly logical,” said Becky.

  Alma came twirling up to them. “Why aren’t you guys dancing?”

  They looked at her. Neither of them could dance and they had made a private pact that they would never learn. They had also agreed never to get married and never to wear high heels or makeup, but they had not told the Giant Ants about that part.

  “You know we don’t,” said Becky.

  “Well, I thought since Micky’s here.”

  “If I won’t dance with just you guys around, I certainly won’t dance if there’s somebody else in the room.”

  Alma looked as sad as her bone structure would allow. “Poets need to develop their sense of rhythm,” she said wistfully.

  Gentian felt guilty, but it was evident at once that Becky was not moved. “Has anybody ever done a study,” she demanded bitterly, “of whether people who make their career choices early are b
ullied and categorized and labeled by everybody in sight? I can’t tell you that anthropologists shouldn’t interfere with the normal workings of society, or marathon runners should be vegetarians, or veterinarians ought to have a pet of their own, because you haven’t settled on one yet.”

  Alma laughed delightedly, which made her look much more like herself. “You’re so funny when you’re mad,” she said, “but I do apologize. Can I dance with your boyfriend, then?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend, and you can run away to Mexico with him if you think he’d like it.”

  “What did I invite him for, if he’s not your boyfriend?”

  Becky cast a wild glance over Alma’s shoulder. Gentian looked too. Micky and Steph were apparently arguing more or less amiably about music: each was making a stack of CDs, and there was a very small stack between them, which they would add to and take away from as their conversation dictated. They could not be heard over the music Alma had put on, which Gentian thought might be a Tori Amos album Juniper also owned, so probably they could not hear what Becky and Alma were saying either.

  “It was very good of you to invite him,” said Becky, in somewhat strained tones, “but how do you suppose somebody would get to be my boyfriend in the first place? If he didn’t like the Giant Ants or you didn’t like him, it would hardly be worth the trouble.”

  Alma immediately became serious, and sat down on the floor at their feet in a billow of red. “That makes me feel a lot better,” she said.

  “I thought it went without saying,” said Becky, much more naturally, “or I’d have said something.”

  “I guess it should, but everything’s changing so much. I don’t even know how tall I am or what size bra I wear, and when I had that cold last week I got out a Goosebumps book to read, and it was so bad I wondered if somebody had taken the inside away and substituted a different one.”

  Becky gurgled. “Changeling books! Oh, that’s nice.”

  “Changeling everything,” said Alma. “And it’s not nice.”

  Gentian thought of Dominic’s saying to Steph, “A mind not to be changed by place or time.”

  “Not everything,” said Becky.

  “Look, Alma,” said Gentian, “it’s not any given book that matters as much as reading the same things and talking about them. Erin lent me some extremely weird ones called Witch Baby and Weetzie Bat. I’ll bring them over next week if you want. I think they’re the Giant Ants books of the future. And I read Alice in Wonderland the day after Christmas and it was just as good as ever.”