“And you want to do the same with weeds.” He didn’t say yes or no, just stood there with his hackles up. “Well, I think you’re doing it. Dr. Edmonds thinks so, too,” I added before he could tell me I didn’t know anything about it. “He once said you found a lot of hidden beauty in weeds. We were talking about those big drawings in the café.”
Dave didn’t bother to speak, just looked carelessly past me out of the window, but his hackles settled a bit, I thought. I asked, “Does Dr. Edmonds know about your idea?”
“Yes. I told him once.”
“Does Mr. Bruce? Those drawings you gave him—”
Dave laughed shortly. “They don’t mean anything. I swapped them for a couple of weeks’ meals. I don’t go talking to a lot of people about it. Why should I? They’d think I was nuts.”
“I’ll bet you talked to Mrs. Dunningham about it.”
His eyes came back to me quickly. “She was different. She got what I was doing. She was the only other person I ever brought up here.”
Something struck me as astonishing. “I wonder why you brought me up here.”
“I don’t know,” Dave said, looking as if he wondered, too. He added roughly, “I can’t imagine.”
“All right, you needn’t take it out on me. I didn’t ask you to, so don’t act as if I’m to blame.”
“You started the prying. How else should I act?”
“Oh, just be your own sweet, surly self,” I said exasperatedly.
Instead of barking back at me, he began to smile, just faintly, just at the corners of that wide, aggravatingly attractive mouth. He was looking straight down into my eyes.
“Why did you jump so when I touched you?” he said casually.
It was too unexpected a question to answer for a minute—besides, I didn’t know the answer yet. It was something I meant to take up with myself later, when I had time to back and fill a bit. I did not mean to take it up with him. I said, “A goose walked over my grave.”
“Funny. I jumped a little, too,” he said.
“That’s absolutely wildly interesting,” I told him, having very little idea what I was saying.
He hadn’t budged from his original position, which was an arm’s length from me, but I suddenly felt suffocated with how close he was and had to work hard at controlling a powerful impulse to step away from him—or toward him. I couldn’t tell which. Or rather, I could tell very well which and didn’t care to admit it. I daren’t shift my eyes, either, any more than I’d dare lower a pointed gun, though his were rapidly making me dizzy. And I was having a maddeningly difficult time breathing.
He muttered, “Potent stuff, isn’t it? Like a lot of little electric charges. Shall we do anything about it?”
“I think not,” I said as coolly as I could with my voice shaking.
“Maybe you’re right. No future in it—we don’t even like each other.”
“Precisely,” I said, deciding I must be imagining this entire conversation.
We said no more for a minute or two that seemed like an hour or two, though his eyes went right on sending disconcertingly blunt messages, and they were disconcertingly uninhibited. “You know,” he remarked presently, “I think you’re wrong. I don’t think we ought to let this pass.” His hand reached out, closed around my arm, and pulled. I set my feet and stayed exactly where I was. “Greensleeves,” he said. “Listen. Things like this don’t happen very often. Believe me.”
I believed him—but I wasn’t budging. This was potent stuff. I fully agreed with him. It was considerably more potent than any stuff I’d ever come across, and considerably deeper water than I’d ever tried flailing around in. My sole but fervent idea was to get to dry land if I could, and stay there.
He said, “Greensleeves, I’m going to kiss you.”
“No you aren’t,” I told him. I jerked away.
I wasn’t afraid of him—don’t misunderstand. I was afraid of me. The plain fact is that I wanted to walk straight into his arms and hang on like a limpet, and for a split second it was perfectly clear to me that I didn’t care a bean for anything else. I knew if I moved one inch toward him right then, I’d get so tangled up in his life that it would take ten years to dislodge me. And I had a vivid picture of what ten years with Dave Kulka would be like—the two of us fighting like wolverines but never able to get free of each other.
“You’re a coward,” he said. “But I won’t insist—if you don’t want me to.”
“I don’t want you to.”
In a minute he said softly, “I don’t believe you.”
After a long time, during which I changed my mind fourteen times—I don’t know what he was doing—he finally said, “However . . .” drew a reluctant long breath, and it became possible to look somewhere else. “I’ll bet I regret this,” he added.
“Mull it over and you won’t,” I quavered. I knew I had to get out of there, and I knew no way to leave except just to leave, so I said, “Good-by, I’m going,” and started for the door.
He muttered, “So long.”
I was walking past walls plastered with those painstaking, beautiful drawings. I stopped without turning and said, “Thanks for showing me these—and telling me what they’re all about.”
“Well, don’t go blabbing it around,” he said irritably.
I snapped, “Don’t be silly,” and started on. So there we were, sounding normal, anyway.
“No, I guess you won’t,” he admitted grudgingly, following me out through the little square hall. On the landing he caught my arm again. I jerked away again but didn’t walk away. I didn’t want to leave. I mean, my feet wouldn’t go. He said, “I thought you had so many questions to ask me. You only asked one.”
I blinked, slowly swam out of my deeps, and thanked heaven he’d reminded me. Sometime I’d care about knowing this—I knew I would. “Yes, well, here’s another—I’ll ask it if you won’t ask why I want to know.”
“What do I care why? Go ahead.”
“Did Mrs. Dunningham have any children?”
He stared and gave a startled laugh, but didn’t ask why I wanted to know, just stood and tried to remember. “No, I guess not,” he said finally. “She never mentioned any.”
“Thanks. Good-by,” I said, and managed to start downstairs.
“Greensleeves!” he called after me, very low. I turned and looked up at him standing there in the brown dimness, leaning on the banister with that lock of hair falling over his eyes, smiling a little. “I’m regretting already—aren’t you?”
I decided to treat that as a rhetorical question. I wrenched my eyes away and went on down the stairs. In a minute I heard him laugh again, but I’d a notion he was laughing at himself.
Easy enough, for him. After a mere—could it be only twenty minutes?—I knew he’d never permit a thing like whatever had happened up there to encroach on his one true, burning interest. He’d just hack it straight out of his life if it got distracting. And it would certainly get distracting, especially to me. I had no burning interest, not if I stayed away from Dave Kulka, which I’d been glad to learn I was just barely bright enough to do.
Besides, he was right—there was no future to it. We were as congenial as . . . well, as my mother and dad, whom I suddenly began to understand a trifle better.
I made it to my room without meeting anyone and fell into a chair beside my half-eaten breakfast, still feeling shaken up. I’d been there about three minutes when there was a tap at my door, and Wynola’s voice said, “Georgetta? Are you there?”
“Hm? Oh. Yes, come on in,” I said, hastily putting on my Georgetta face.
Wynola opened my door and put her head in. “Sherry said you were back. But I thought—”
“Sherry?”
“Yes, he’s here. In the living room. He wants to see you.”
Obviously, he’d already
seen me—coming down the stairs. “OK,” I said, with something less than eagerness. I’d sooner have confronted an X-ray camera at this particular moment. However, Wynola went away, mission accomplished, and I went to the living room to see what Sherry wanted.
2
I found him standing by the front window, moodily fiddling with the blind cord. He glanced around quickly, and it was a minute before he remembered to say “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said, and waited. It was certainly his move.
“Well. How are you?” he added about three minutes later, and smiled, but kept studying me sharply.
“Best of health.” I decided I’d better move after all. “How come you’re not teaching yourself Bantu or something over at the Rainbow?”
“Oh—it’s Sunday.”
“Gee, I never knew that to stop you before.”
He fidgeted—I’d never known Sherry to fidget before, either —then, elaborately careless, said, “I thought you might like to go to the zoo.”
Well, this was an unusual development. He’d never thought I might like to go anywhere before. “Why, sure,” I told him when I’d got over being staggered. “That’d be nice. Can I just go as is?”
“You look mighty fine to me,” he said without the glimmer of a smile.
Well, I looked mighty like I’d just got up and thrown on whatever came handiest, which was what I had done, but I decided the animals wouldn’t care if Sherry didn’t. I was delighted to get away from the house and hoped we stayed away for a long time.
“Do we walk or take the bus?” I asked as we went down the steps.
“We drive.” Sherry bobbed his head toward an elderly but resolute-looking blue Volkswagen standing at the curb next door. “I borrowed my roommate’s car.”
“My, you have been busy this morning!” I said in astonishment.
He ignored that and helped me into the car, where I instantly almost disappeared into the upholstery. I guess there were a few token springs left in the bucket seats, but they’d collapsed so completely in the course of a hard life that a person was almost sitting on the floor. I attempted, without much success, to tug my skirt down over my knees, which were about level with my nose, as Sherry climbed into the driver’s seat and folded up like a jackknife in his turn.
I sputtered, trying not to laugh, and asked, “Can you see out the windscreen?”
“Certainly,” he replied with dignity, and started the car, repeating, “Windscreen?”
I dredged up some excuse for the Britishism and shouted it over the noise of the motor, but he’d already lost interest, which was totally unlike him. For a while, briskly shifting gears or staring in a preoccupied way at the traffic, he appeared to have forgotten I was there. But when we’d got well out on Jefferson and the Volkswagen had quit gnashing its teeth and settled down to sounding like a busy percolator, he glanced at me with an obviously forced smile and said in a voice intended to be casual, “Do you know Dave Kulka very well?”
“Not very,” I answered, though I certainly knew him better than I had when I got up that morning.
“Wonder how old he is, anyhow?” Sherry went on.
“How old he is? No idea. In his twenties somewhere, I suppose.”
“He may be older,” Sherry said gloomily. “He may be darn near thirty. He was in the Marines four years.”
I doubted if Dave was over twenty-five, Marines or no, but I didn’t argue. “What’s his age to do with anything?”
“Nothing, I just wondered.” Sherry drove for a while. Then he added, “I’d have said you knew him pretty well.”
“Now, why?”
“Well, you seemed mighty chummy with him out in the back yard this morning,” Sherry burst out irritably.
So there it was; he’d seen us, probably from his window, when I bearded Dave outside the little tool shed. And I suppose he’d watched us talking in no very casual way, seen Dave take my arm, and me pull back, and Dave’s raised eyebrow afterwards—then he’d seen Dave point toward his room and the two of us go in the house together. And twenty minutes later he had an outing all planned and a car all borrowed and was sitting in Mrs. Jackson’s living room waiting for me to come downstairs. He had been busy. I couldn’t help brightening as I contemplated this welcome picture.
Sherry’s gloom had deepened—probably because I hadn’t answered him. As I was wondering how I could explain a single thing without Blabbing It All Around, which I did not intend to do, Sherry said, “Don’t I get an answer?”
I pointed out that he hadn’t asked a question, adding, “Anyway, I can’t think what you mean by ‘chummy.’ I don’t even like Dave. Or he me. It’s the one thing we agree on.”
Sherry eyed me hopefully, then scowled. “Then how come you—”
He stopped because I stopped him, with a look. How come I’d gone upstairs with Dave was my own affair, after all. Whether I’d planned a whole campaign to hurl myself at his head or merely trotted up to borrow an egg, I failed to see that Sherry was due an explanation. I frosted up just enough to convey this sentiment.
“I’m sorry,” Sherry muttered, and concentrated on the road. “I don’t mean to grill you. I just don’t like to see you get involved with Dave, that’s all. He’s out of your league, Greensleeves. He’s too old for you.”
“Heavens, yes,” I said amiably, though I didn’t think age had a thing to do with Dave’s brand of high explosives. “Besides which he’s got no manners. He’s a jerk. So why not talk about something pleasant?”
“All right. I’ll be glad to.” Sherry grinned crookedly at me and relaxed a bit, presently asked me if I liked baby elephants, and by the time we turned into the zoo entrance, he was behaving almost like himself.
It turned out to be a good day, one of the best I can remember, in spite of the sticky start it had got off to. Sherry is the perfect companion at a zoo, and I was so glad of some nice low-voltage, unperturbing company that I managed to be good company myself. It’s a charming zoo, anyway, not vast like the London one but large enough to do a lot of strolling around in, with a new cluster of cage buildings or pits always just down the next slope or around a bend in the path. Everything seems bright and fresh-painted and cheerful, and though the whole place is in full sunshine, it’s ringed all about by soaring trees. Sherry and I just dawdled along, exactly the way I like to do at a zoo, standing hypnotized for quite a while beside the pool with the Emperor Penguins, who were also standing hypnotized in little rows on their cement island, staring back at us, while they enjoyed the clouds of fine spray that shot up all around to keep them nice and wet. An object lesson, Sherry remarked, in the laissez-faire theory of philosophy: you just stand there, and eventually everything turns out all right.
“If you’re a penguin,” I added. “A zoo penguin. The wild ones must have to hump themselves a bit just to keep the food coming.”
“Well, I guess so, but I’ll bet they do an awful lot of just standing around in rows, contemplating—even in the wild. You always see pictures of them doing that. It’s not a bad life, come to think of it.”
“Oh, come off it. You’d be bored stiff unless you were charging around seeing what it was like to live in Timbuktu or someplace.”
Sherry grinned but looked thoughtful as we walked on. “I’m not so sure. Maybe all I want to do is just stand around wondering what Timbuktu is like. I haven’t done much charging so far.”
“You went to England.”
“I was taken.”
“Well, my word, be patient. You’re not even out of school. Oh, look—bears.”
There was a whole row of pits, full of bears of assorted flavors, but I was inattentive at first because I was thinking about what Sherry had said. It struck me forcibly, and for the first time, that he might have hit himself off quite well at that. Of course, it was early to pass judgment. But already it was clear he was no man of action. Lo
ok what it had taken to galvanize him into merely asking me out. His mind was a dynamo, but he even walked in a drifting, contemplative way—he even played tennis that way—and as long as things were jogging along well enough, he let them jog. And he’d planned his whole life along those lines. Cereal boxes from nine to five—because he could do it, not because he particularly liked to. That would supply necessities and leave his mind free to go on finding out about things he’d no need to know and never meant to use, and wondering how it felt to live in places he might never bother to go to.
Well, all right, what’s wrong with that? I thought. Nothing. But it had never occurred to me before.
“Which one do you like best?” said Sherry, who was still on the subject of bears.
“The Kodiak.”
“You do?”
“You bet your life.” I want my bears big and dangerous and awesome—real honest-to-gosh bears, and the Kodiak was the biggest and awesomest of the lot.
“I like these little black fellows,” Sherry said, gazing fascinated into the honey bears’ pit—I think they were the honey bears. “Look, it says people sometimes make pets of them. I wonder what it would be like to have a bear for a pet.”
“Nerve-wracking. They might want to sleep on the foot of your bed.”
“At least they’d keep your feet warm.”
We grinned and went on toward the monkey and reptile house, and I gave over analyzing him. It was too pleasant a day; I was all for laissez-faire myself. It was wonderful just to stroll about in the sunshine with Sherry and let my mind drift. We began to agree about everything—that the iguanas looked like Javanese dancers wearing those slit-eyed, stylized masks and scalloped headdresses, and the giraffes precisely like Parisian fashion models, right down to their sweeping eyelashes and studied walk, and that there seemed no excuse at all for Bactrian camels. Sherry’s favorites of the lot were the two baby elephants, and I even pretended to agree on that, though my own choice was the Barred Bandicoot—a very small, appealing monkey-creature sitting in a small, tucked-away cage all by himself. He looked much more babyish than the baby elephants—though I guess he was a full-grown bandicoot—but what really gripped me was reading on his cage that “expert dodging” was his only defense. That seemed so frightfully pathetic, somehow.