Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

  Maria Mitchell sat on Gentian’s pillow, watching the alarm-setting process narrowly. She always seemed both ingenuous and calculating, because of the markings on her face. Her muzzle was white, with a harmless-looking pale pink nose; but above that her face was half orange and half black, with judgmental green eyes and a rakish look to the ears. Gentian rubbed the back of her neck, and Murr fell over sideways—dropping, as Gentian’s father liked to observe, as if she had been shot, which might be striking but was not a very pleasant simile—and purred loudly.

  Gentian looked at the telescope. This was, really, a good time for Saturn; she ought to just try it. She went up the scuffed cherry steps, thinking, I should really refinish those soon. She opened the dome. For no reason she could think of, in the ashamed knowledge that she was behaving ritualistically rather than scientifically, she shut her eyes, fitted her face to the telescope, and adjusted it by feel. She opened her eyes.

  One of the mean little windows in the new house was lit up, and on the drawn shade was the silhouette of a woman sitting at a dressing table, gazing into its oval mirror. Gentian stared at her, using every technique she had learned for looking at the sky. She didn’t see how that delicate, curled, elegant profile with its coiled hair could possibly be Mrs. Hardy. Well, maybe they had a house guest who never went out either. Come and see us for a week; I promise we’ll never go anywhere. After all, Erin had moods when such an offer would seem like heaven.

  The woman put a long hand up to her head and smoothed back a hair or two. Then she sat still again, gazing. Her blouse— her dress, almost surely—had a stiff frill of lace that stood up under her chin and ran down the low opening. Her little sister would not ask her indecent questions.

  Gentian shut her eyes and turned her head from the telescope. What on earth was she doing? She was a scientist, not a spy. It had never once before occurred to her that one could use the telescope to look at things far closer than any planet, closer even than the moon. It was like reading Junie’s diary, except that there was no excuse for it.

  The telescope would obviously be useless until Becky had time to really diagnose and fix it. Gentian shut the dome, put on the lens cap, got into bed, and turned out the light. Maria Mitchell came and sat on her pillow, purring, just out of reach.

  The next evening after she had done her homework, she sat looking at the telescope. Everyone had said it was a good model. She had originally meant to make her own, and still had the half-ground mirror somewhere, but it took too long and made her twitchy, and her parents kept pointing out that there was no manufacturer’s warranty on an instrument you made yourself. This had not impressed Gentian much, but the fact that the longer making the telescope took, the more unique astronomical events she would miss, did impress her. And now she was in the same situation. She could take up working on the homemade one again, she supposed.

  What had she done before she discovered astronomy? That was a long time ago; she would have been about Rosie’s age. She had done a lot of things, but there was no center to her life then. Astronomy to her was what poetry had always been to Becky.

  “I,” said Gentian to her cat, “am going to go live in the desert and discover comets like your namesake.”

  Becky would, if presented with that sentence, ask how a comet could be like anybody’s namesake, let alone like a shy mathematician from Nantucket.

  And who, Gentian thought, would lay hands on her telescopes if she lived in the desert? The Giant Ants had already had several arguments about whether all of them could possibly go to the same college and at the same time properly fulfill their extremely varied destinies. Steph and Alma would probably change their minds about said destinies five or six times between now and college time, but Becky, Erin, and Gentian were steadier. Even the difficulty of finding in one place both good star-gazing conditions and a decent creative writing program, leaving Erin and her need for the space program out of it entirely, had produced several agonizing four-in-the-morning conversations. Gentian was afraid they were due for another one, if Becky should take it into her head to add Micky to the equation.

  “Nonsense,” she said to the cat. “No romance for us, not even little Victorian notes from consumptive intellectuals to keep in scrimshaw boxes. Romance interferes with real life.”

  Maria Mitchell, prevented in her youth from having an opinion on this subject, rolled over on her back and required to have her belly rubbed. Gentian did this, meanwhile subjecting what she had just said to a Rebeccan analysis and laughing wildly at the notion of keeping consumptive intellectuals in scrimshaw boxes.

  She looked at the telescope again. She was almost tempted to put it away somewhere, but that would be admitting defeat. She reached into the deep shelf under her bedside table, pulled up the antenna on the weather radio, and turned it on. “Serving east central Minnesota and west central Wisconsin,” said a rather surly voice, “in cooperation with Minnesota’s Division of Emergency Management and the Department of Transportation. The forecast for the Twin Cities metropolitan area: tonight, clear until late, then partly cloudy, with northeast winds fifteen to twenty-five miles per hour. Partly cloudy tomorrow with increasing clouds by evening. Chance of rain or snow, sixty percent. The low tonight—”

  Gentian turned the radio off and approached the telescope firmly, like a cat she intended to take to the vet. Maria Mitchell, being both observant and cautious, went under the bed.

  The woman with the elegant profile was sitting at the window with her chin in her hand, gazing straight at Gentian. Gentian lifted her forehead from the rest with extreme deliberation, thinking furiously, get out of my telescope, damn you. She peered around the telescope. There was nobody in the window, which was dark. Probably the woman had gone to call Gentian’s paaents and complain. Gentian sat by the telephone for some time, though she would not know until it actually rang if she would pick it up hastily and impersonate her mother. It did not ring.

  On Wednesday and Thursday she kept away from the telescope; this had to be accomplished by staying downstairs until she was too sleepy to keep her eyes open. Her sisters made snide comments; her father asked her if she was feeling all right, and felt her forehead; her mother asked if the heat was working properly upstairs. Gentian responded vaguely and did her geometry at the kitchen table. On Thursday evening her father served dinner in the dining room, displacing a Girl Scout project of Rosemary’s and eliciting a shower of scornful comment from Juniper. Gentian smiled at him and decided to do some chore of his over the weekend.

  After dinner Rosemary, grumbling, took her project upstairs to the guest room, and Juniper, sneering, went out onto the front porch to wait for Sarah, with whom she was going ice-skating. Gentian sat at the kitchen table, making Christmas lists and counting her money and cursing the purchase of Bulfinch’s Mythology, which had given her a series of unpleasant dreams and set her back financially.

  Somebody knocked at the back door, briskly. Gentian got up; it was probably Mrs. Zimmerman with some late pumpkins. She pulled aside the blue curtain over the glass in the door and peered out. The boy from next door looked back at her. She had to look up at him: he was taller than Junie. She gaped foolishly for a moment. In the brilliant blare of the security light he looked like somebody on a stage, about to summon spirits like Prospero. He held up the snake his mother had borrowed, as if it were a scepter. He had a round glittering cookie tin in his other hand, like a crown.

  Gentian unbolted the door and opened it. His hair was black, and his eyes were dark blue or perhaps black, and his lips were as red as wine, though that was probably from the cold. He was beautiful. He might be taller than Junie, but Junie was out.

  He smiled at her. His teeth shone, but were no more pointed than anyone else’s. “I’m Dominic Hardy,” he said. His voice had changed already; it was middling deep and clear. “Here’s your snake, and my mother sent some cookies.”

  He was wearing a white shirt—no sweater, no jacket, no hat. The brisk northeast wind of a Minnes
ota October lifted the hair on his forehead.

  “Come in; you’ll freeze,” said Gentian, intelligently, and banged the door behind him so that somebody would hear and come help her out. The guest room was right above the back porch; maybe Rosemary would hear. She was too young and shy to constitute competition, and perhaps Dominic would think she was funny.

  “Do sit down,” said Gentian, removing the snake from his grasp and sliding it in between the refrigerator and the wall. “I was just going to make some fudge.”

  She had never made it in her life, but she had hung around plaguing Junie when Junie made it. There were cookies and divinity and fruitcake already, but Juniper had made all those and Gentian would have to say so. There were Dominic’s cookies, but you couldn’t feed people things they had brought themselves, could you?

  “You could wait and take some back with you.” You’ve come such a long way, she thought, and almost snickered at herself. It would repay him for the cookies, at least.

  Dominic either had good manners or didn’t want to go home. “Thank you,” he said, and sat down.

  He was not very conversational. Gentian tried him on astronomy, mathematics, Shakespeare, Robert Heinlein, modern poetry, a couple of Junie’s favorite bands, a couple of Junie’s television shows, and finally, as a mad stab in the dark, Elizabethan music. His responses were mostly quotations. When she said she had a telescope, he said lazily, “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken.” Gentian knew that this was from a sonnet by Keats. Steph had made her a poster of it in somewhat shaky calligraphy the summer after sixth grade, and it was hanging over her desk at this moment. But something prevented her from letting Dominic know this. She felt odd that he should quote one of the Giant Ants’ own special favorite poems.

  “These days you’re lucky to see a new comet,” she said, and pulled the canister of sugar from under the overhang of the upper cabinets.

  His remark about mathematics was, “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.” Gentian had studied that one in school, didn’t like it, and felt justified because Becky didn’t either, even though Becky was wild about some of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s other poems. She made a noncommittal noise and got out the chocolate.

  For Shakespeare, he said, “Nature’s child, warbling his native wood-notes wild.” Gentian was not familiar with this quotation, if it was one, but it sounded unlikely to her. She took the milk from the refrigerator.

  For Heinlein, he said, quoting from Glory Road, “Women and Cats. Men and Dogs.”

  “That’s what I don’t like about Heinlein, all right,” said Gentian. “Some of his books are awfully good, though.”

  “Specialization is for insects,” said Dominic, quoting from a Heinleinian passage her mother used to deride, from a novel Gentian had not read yet because her parents had suggested she wait until she was sixteen or so.

  It was odd that he should have read so many of the things her family and friends had. And this was a discussion she might at more leisure have found fruitful, but by now she was hunting for the fudge recipe and wondering if she could remember it. She could just say she couldn’t find it, and offer him something of Junie’s. On the other hand, it was useful to have something to occupy her; sitting at the table with him would be much more embarrassing. Poking about in the dusty disarray of her father’s recipe box, she said, “Do you like modern poetry?”

  “Tennis without a net,” said Dominic, definitively.

  “That’s not true at all,” said Gentian. “It’s just got a different sort of structure.”

  Come to think of it, the fudge recipe wasn’t on a card, it was in a cookbook. Junie had spilt milk on that page, so if she looked at the page-edges of each cookbook, there should be a bulgy wrinkle in about the right spot. “It was okay for Robert Frost to say that,” she added, shoving Betty Crocker back into place and yanking Fanny Farmer out. “He was talking about how he felt about writing it. But reading it with that attitude is like going to a hockey game and getting mad because it’s not tennis.” All of this was Becky’s opinion, more or less verbatim. Gentian liked the modern poetry that Becky read to her, and otherwise had no relationship with it.

  “But they call it tennis,” said Dominic; for the very first time, he sounded about half interested.

  “No, they don’t. They call it a game. People just assume it must be the same one they’re used to.”

  “What bass is our viol for tragic tones?” said Dominic.

  “I beg your pardon?” There was the recipe. Gentian propped the book against the tea canister and began assembling pots and measuring spoons.

  Dominic did not answer her.

  “I’ve heard recorder music coming from your house,” said Gentian, rather desperately. “Do you play?”

  “Do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe?” said Dominic.

  He did not, despite quoting Hamlet in a fury, sound offended, but Gentian at this point gave up on him and concentrated on the fudge, which was giving her difficulties.

  She had burned her tongue for the sixth time, and the fudge was still refusing to form a ball in the cold water, when Junie came back. She banged the back door behind her, dropped her skates on the floor of the porch, and shot the bolt, which Gentian always forgot to do. The sound made Dominic jump, which was some satisfaction. Juniper came into the kitchen, pulled off her green beret, shook out all her long red hair, and said, “What are you burning?”

  “None of your business,” said Gentian, stirring idly. “Say hello to Dominic.”

  Juniper didn’t even blink. “Hello, Dominic,” she said. “I’m Junie.”

  Gentian turned around from the stove, moving the spoon randomly in the uncooperative fudge; she had to see this.

  Dominic studied Juniper for several seconds as if she were a kind of food he had never seen before, and then smiled at her. Gentian saw Junie melt, and made a bet with herself about how long it would be before they went out together. He was better than the smoking seniors, anyway; if Mom ever found out about them she was liable to ground all three girls until they were twenty.

  Rosemary, who must have been having her bath when she should have been listening to Gentian bang the back door, came slouching into the kitchen in Juniper’s green flannel bathrobe, which she liked because it was too long for her and she could sweep the skirts around the floor, gathering cat hair and playing at being a princess. Junie’s melting process reversed itself suddenly, but she couldn’t launch into a tirade because Dominic was there.

  While Juniper was thinking how to be politely scathing, a thing Gentian knew to be almost impossible for her, Rosemary stared at Dominic as if he were a food she recognized and didn’t like. He smiled at her, too. Gentian fully expected Rosemary to turn red and run away, which was her usual method of dealing with strangers who were nice to her.

  But Rosemary spoke to him. “You’ve got the broken chair,” she said. “You need the cushion.”

  And she swept Juniper’s bathrobe around and exited without tripping on it, to return bearing the fat gold-and-black-and-white Hmong pillow that they had given their mother for her birthday. Gentian supposed that it had had to happen sometime. Rosie would probably appreciate somebody who had no conversation; it would save her having to make any. She could get pregnant and be the family statistic.

  A horrible smell of burnt sugar and chocolate smote her nose, and as she recoiled from that she felt herself recoiling also at the thoughts she had just had. It was all right to think that way about Juniper; Juniper was acting like an idiot and had been for years now. But Rosie was all right.

  “Get away from that pan!” shouted Juniper.

  Gentian got out of her way and yielded up the wooden spoon cheerfully, and went to sit at the table and watch Rosie be worshipful and Dominic see Juniper in a temper.

  Dominic said, not very loudly, “What is the difference between an angry girl and a mad bull?”

  Gentian froze.

&nb
sp; “What?” said Rosie.

  “You can reason with the bull.”

  Rosie giggled. Gentian wanted to, because he had so perfectly characterized Juniper. If he had asked what was the difference between Junie in a temper and a mad bull, she would have fallen off her chair laughing and repeated it to be sure Junie, now immersed in clouds of steam at the sink, had heard.

  She said, “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Dominic.

  Gentian looked at him dubiously, but Rosie said at once, “That’s not funny! " and collapsed over the table in a fit of giggles.

  Dominic looked at Gentian across the table. His eyes were extremely blue. “Ah,” he said. It was what her mother called a “diagnostic ah.” She didn’t know what he had diagnosed—rightly, that she was a feminist, wrongly, that she had no sense of humor, or simply that she had not thought his original joke a good one. She looked back at him, as if he were something she saw through the telescope. Rosie stopped laughing and sat up.

  “I have a project that I need help with,” said Dominic, impartially to both of them. Gentian stared; he had actually volunteered a piece of information. She wondered if Rosemary’s attitude was responsible. She tried to look encouraging, and Dominic explained further. “I want to build a time machine.”

  Rosemary looked stunned. Gentian said, “What for?”

  “Well,” said Dominic, “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me, what is the maid without a tress?”

  “Bald,” said Rosemary.

  Dominic grinned at her. “No,” he said.

  “Junie didn’t have any hair until she was almost three,” said Gentian meanly.

  Juniper, stirring an entirely new batch of fudge, ignored this feeble thrust, but Dominic leaned back against the Hmong cushion and looked carefully at her. “Well, we’d better have Junie, then,” he said.

  Gentian, feeling conspired against, said, “Well, what do you want to build a time machine for?”