The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

  When I get home I pencil in “fencing tournament” on the fourth Saturday of the month. I think about calling Tom, but it is late and, besides, he said to tell him next week. I put a reminder sticky on the calendar: “Tell Tom yes.”

  Chapter Five

  BY FRIDAY AFTERNOON MR. CRENSHAW HAS STILL NOT said anything to us about the experimental treatment. Maybe Mr. Aldrin was wrong. Maybe Mr. Aldrin talked him out of it. On-line, there’s a flurry of discussion, mostly on the private news groups, but nobody seems to know when or where human trials are scheduled.

  I do not say anything on-line about what Mr. Aldrin told us. He did not say not to talk about it, but it does not feel right. If Mr. Crenshaw has changed his mind and everyone gets upset, then he will be angry. He looks angry much of the time anyway when he comes to check on us.

  The show at the planetarium is “Exploring the Outer Planets and Their Satellites.” It has been on since Labor Day, which means it is not too crowded now, even on Saturday. I go early, to the first showing, which is also less crowded even on days when it is crowded. Only a third of the seats are occupied, so Eric and Linda and I can take up a whole row without being too close to anyone.

  The amphitheater smells funny, but it always does. As the lights dim and the artificial sky darkens, I feel the same old excitement. Even though these pinpricks of light that begin to show on the dome are not really stars, it is about stars. The light is not as old; it has not been worn smooth by its passage through billions and billions of miles—it has come from a projector less than a ten-thousandth of a light-second away—but I still enjoy it.

  What I don’t enjoy is the long introduction that talks about what we knew a hundred years ago, and fifty years ago, and so on. I want to know what we know now, not what my parents might have heard when they were children. What difference does it make if someone in the distant past thought there were canals on Mars?

  The plush on my seat has a hard, rough spot. I feel it with my fingers—someone has stuck gum or candy there and the cleaning compound hasn’t taken it all. Once I notice it, I can’t not notice it. I slide my brochure between me and the rough spot.

  Finally the program moves out of history and into the present. The latest space-probe photographs of the outer planets are spectacular; the simulated flybys almost make me feel that I could fall out of my seat into the gravity well of one planet after another. I wish I could be there myself. When I was little and first saw newscasts of people in space I wanted to be an astronaut, but I know that’s impossible. Even if I had the new LifeTime treatment so I would live long enough, I would still be autistic. What you can’t change don’t grieve over, my mother said.

  I don’t learn anything I don’t already know, but I enjoy the show anyway. After the show, I am hungry. It is past my usual lunchtime.

  “We could have lunch,” Eric says.

  “I am going home,” I say. I have good jerky at home, and apples that will not be crisp much longer.

  Eric nods and turns away.

  ON SUNDAY I GO TO CHURCH. THE ORGANIST PLAYS MOZART before the service starts. The music sounds right with the formality of the worship. It all matches, like shirt and tie and jacket should match: not alike but fitting together harmoniously. The choir sings a pleasant anthem by Rutter. I do not like Rutter as much as Mozart, but it doesn’t make my head hurt.

  Monday is cooler, with a damp chill breeze out of the northeast. It is not cold enough to wear a jacket or sweater, but it is more comfortable. I know that the worst of the summer is over.

  On Tuesday it is warm again. Tuesdays I do my grocery shopping. The stores are less crowded on Tuesdays, even when Tuesday falls on the first of the month.

  I watch the people in the grocery store. When I was a child, we were told that soon there would be no grocery stores. Everyone would order their food over the Internet, and it would be delivered to their doors. The family next door did that for a while, and my mother thought it was silly. She and Mrs. Taylor used to argue about it. Their faces would get shiny, and their voices sounded like knives scraping together. I thought they hated each other when I was little, before I learned that grownups— people—could disagree and argue without disliking each other.

  There are still places where you can have your groceries delivered, but around here the places that tried it went out of business. What you can do now is order groceries to be held in the “Quick Pickup” section, where a conveyor belt delivers a box to the pickup lane. I do that sometimes, but not often. It costs 10 percent more, and it is important for me to have the experience of shopping. That’s what my mother said. Mrs. Taylor said maybe I was getting enough stress without that, but my mother said Mrs. Taylor was too sensitive. Sometimes I wished that Mrs. Taylor was my mother instead of my mother, but then I felt bad about that, too.

  When people in the grocery store are shopping alone, they often look worried and intent and they ignore others. Mother taught me about the social etiquette of grocery stores, and a lot of it came easily to me, despite the noise and confusion. Because no one expects to stop and chat with strangers, they avoid eye contact, making it easy to watch them covertly without annoying them. They don’t mind that I don’t make eye contact, though it is polite to look directly at the person who takes your card or money, just for a moment. It is polite to say something about the weather, even if the person in front of you in line said almost the same thing, but you don’t have to.

  Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store. In our Daily Life Skills classes, we were taught to make a list and go directly from one aisle to another, checking off items on the list. Our teacher advised us to research prices ahead of time, in the newspaper, rather than compare prices while standing in the aisle. I thought—he told us—that he was teaching us how normal people shop.

  But the man who is blocking the aisle in front of me has not had that lecture. He seems normal, but he is looking at every single jar of spaghetti sauce, comparing prices, reading labels. Beyond him, a short gray-haired woman with thick glasses is trying to peer past him at the same shelves; I think she wants one of the sauces on my side, but he is in the way and she is not willing to bother him. Neither am I. The muscles of his face are tight, making little bulges on his brow and cheeks and chin. His skin is a little shiny. He is angry. The gray-haired woman and I both know that a well-dressed man who looks angry can explode if he is bothered.

  Suddenly he looks up and catches my eye. His face flushes and looks redder and shinier. “You could have said something!” he says, yanking his basket to one side, blocking the gray-haired woman even more. I smile at her and nod; she pushes her basket out around him, and then I go through.

  “It’s so stupid,” I hear him mutter. “Why can’t they all be the same size?”

  I know better than to answer him, though it is tempting. If people talk, they expect someone to listen. I am supposed to pay attention and listen when people talk, and I have trained myself to do that most of the time. In a grocery store sometimes people do not expect an answer and they get angry if you answer them. This man is already angry. I can feel my heart beating.

  Ahead of me now are two giggling children, very young, pulling packets of seasoning mix out of racks. A young woman in jeans looks around the end of row and snarls, “Jackson! Misty! Put those back!” I jump. I know she wasn’t talking to me, but the tone sets my teeth on edge. One child squeals, right beside me now, and the other says, “Won’t!” The woman, her face squeezed into a strange shape by her anger, rushes past me. I hear a child yelp and do not turn around. I want to say, “Quiet, quiet, quiet,” but it is not my business; it is not all right to tell other people to be quiet if you are not the parent or the boss. I hear other voices now, women’s voices, someone scolding the woman with the children, and turn quickly into the cross-aisle. My heart is running in my chest, faster and stronger than usual.

  People choose to come to stores like this, to hear this noise and see other
people being rushed and angry and upset. Remote ordering and delivery failed because they would rather come and see other people than sit alone and be alone until the delivery comes. Not everywhere: in some cities, remote ordering has been successful. But here… I steer around a center display of wine, realize I’ve gone past the aisle I wanted, and look carefully all ways before turning back.

  I always go down the spice aisle, whether I need spices or not. When it’s not crowded—and today it’s not—I stop and let myself smell the fragrances. Even over floor wax, cleaning fluid, and the scent of bubble gum from some child nearby I can detect a faint blend of spices and herbs. Cinnamon, cumin, cloves, marjoram, nutmeg… even the names are interesting. My mother liked to use spices and herbs in cooking. She let me smell them all. Some I did not like, but most of them felt good inside my head. Today I need chili spice. I do not have to stop and look; I know where it is on the shelf, a red-and-white box.

  I AM DRENCHED IN SWEAT SUDDENLY. MARJORY IS AHEAD OF me, not noticing me because she is in grocery store shopping mode. She has opened a spice container—which, I wonder, until the air current brings me the unmistakable fragrance of cloves. My favorite. I turn my head quickly and try to concentrate on the shelf of food colorings, candied fruit, and cake decorations. I do not understand why these are in the same aisle with spices and herbs, but they are.

  Will she see me? If she sees me, will she speak? Should I speak to her? My tongue feels as big as a zucchini. I sense motion approaching. Is it her or someone else? If I were really shopping, I would not look. I do not want cake decorations or candied cherries.

  “Hi, Lou,” she says. “Baking a cake?”

  I turn to look at her. I have not seen her except at Tom and Lucia’s or in the car to and from the airport. I have never seen her in this store before. This is not her right setting… or it may be, but I didn’t know it. “I—I’m just looking,” I say. It is hard to talk. I hate it that I am sweating.

  “They are pretty colors,” she says, in a voice that seems to hold nothing but mild interest. At least she is not laughing out loud. “Do you like fruitcake?”

  “N-no,” I say, swallowing the large lump in my throat. “I think… I think the colors are prettier than the taste.” That is wrong—tastes are not pretty or ugly—but it is too late to change.

  She nods, her expression serious. “I feel the same way,” she says. “The first time I had fruitcake, when I was little, I expected it to taste good because it was so pretty. And then… I didn’t like it.”

  “Do you… do you shop here often?” I ask.

  “Not usually,” she says. “I’m on my way to a friend’s house and she asked me to pick up some things for her.” She looks at me, and I am once more conscious of how it is hard to talk. It is even hard to breathe, and I feel slimy with the sweat trickling down my back. “Is this your regular store?”

  Yes, I say.

  “Then maybe you can show me where to find rice and aluminum foil,” she says.

  My mind is blank for a moment before I can remember; then I know again. “The rice is third aisle, halfway along,” I say. “And the foil’s over on Eighteen—”

  “Oh, please,” she says, her voice sounding happy. “Just show me. I’ve already wandered around in here for what feels like an hour.”

  “Show—take you?” I feel instantly stupid; this is what she meant, of course. “Come on,” I say, wheeling my basket and earning a glare from a large woman with a basket piled high with produce. “Sorry,” I say to her; she pushes past without answering.

  “I’ll just follow,” Marjory says. “I don’t want to annoy people…”

  I nod and head first for the rice, since we’re on Aisle Seven and that is closer. I know that Marjory is behind me; knowing that makes a warm place on my back, like a ray of sun. I am glad she cannot see my face; I can feel the heat there, too.

  While Marjory looks at the shelves of rice—rice in bags, rice in boxes, long-grain and short-grain and brown, and rice in combinations with other things, and she does not know where the kind of rice is that she wants—I look at Marjory. One of her eyelashes is longer than the others and darker brown. Her eyes have more than one color in them, little flecks in the iris that make it more interesting.

  Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they’re related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don’t notice that. When I first went to get my state ID card, the form asked for eye color. I tried to write in all the colors in my own eyes, but the blank space wasn’t big enough. They told me to put “brown.” I put “brown,” but that is not the only color in my eyes. It is just the color that people see because they do not really look at other people’s eyes.

  I like the color of Marjory’s eyes because they are her eyes and because I like all the colors in them. I like all the colors in her hair, too. She probably puts “brown” on forms that ask her for hair color, but her hair has many different colors, more than her eyes. In the store’s light, it looks duller than outside, with none of the orange glints, but I know they are there.

  “Here it is,” she says. She is holding a box of rice, white, long-grained, quick-cooking. “On to the foil!” she says. Then she grins. “The cooking kind, not the fencing kind, I mean.”

  I grin back, feeling my cheek muscles tighten. I knew what kind of foil she meant. Did she think I didn’t know, or was she just making a joke? I lead her to the middle cross-aisle of the store, all the way across to the aisle that has plastic bags and plastic storage dishes and rolls of plastic film and waxed paper and aluminum foil.

  “That was quick,” she says. She is quicker to pick out the foil she wants than she was with the rice. “Thanks, Lou,” she says. “You were a big help.”

  I wonder if I should tell her about the express lines at this store. Will she be annoyed? But she said she was in a hurry.

  “The express lines,” I say. My mind blanks suddenly, and I hear my voice going flat and dull. “At this time, people come in and have more than the express lines sign says—”

  “That’s so frustrating,” she says. “Is there one end or the other that’s faster?”

  I am not sure what she means at first. The two ends of the checkout go the same speed, one coming as another leaves. It’s the middle, where the checker is, that can be slow or fast. Marjory is waiting, not rushing me. Maybe she means which end of the row of checkout stands, if not the express lanes, is faster. I know that; it’s the end nearest the customer services desk. I tell her, and she nods.

  “Sorry, Lou, but I have to rush,” she says. “I’m supposed to meet Pam at six-fifteen.” It is 6:07; if Pam lives very far away she will not make it.

  “Good luck,” I say. I watch her move briskly down the aisle away from me, swerving smoothly around the other shoppers.

  “So—that’s what she looks like,” says someone behind me. I turn around. It is Emmy. As usual, she looks angry. “She’s not that pretty.”

  “I think she is pretty,” I say.

  “I can tell,” Emmy says. “You’re blushing.”

  My face is hot. I may be blushing, but Emmy didn’t have to say so. It is not polite to comment on someone else’s expression in public. I say nothing.

  “I suppose you think she’s in love with you,” Emmy says. Her voice is hostile. I can tell she thinks this is what I think and that she thinks I am wrong, that Marjory is not in love with me. I am unhappy that Emmy thinks these things but happy that I can understand all that in what she says and how she says it. Years ago I would not have understood.

  “I do not know,” I say, keeping my voice calm and low. Down the aisle, a woman has paused with her hand on a package of plastic storage containers to look at us. “You do not know what I think,” I say to Emmy. “And you do not know what she thinks. You are trying to mind-read; that is an error.”

  “You think you’re so smart,” Emmy says. “Just because you work with compu
ters and math. You don’t know anything about people.”

  I know the woman down the aisle is drifting closer and listening to us. I feel seared. We should not be talking like this in public. We should not be noticed. We should blend in; we should look and sound and act normal. If I try to tell Emmy that, she will be even angrier. She might say something loud. “I have to go,” I say to Emmy. “I’m late.”

  “For what, for a date?” she asks. She says the word date louder than the other words and with an upward-moving tone that means she is being sarcastic.

  “No,” I say in a calm voice. If I am calm maybe she will let me alone. “I am going to watch TV. I always watch TV on—” Suddenly I cannot think of the day of the week; my mind is blank. I turn away, as if I had said the whole sentence. Emmy laughs, a harsh sound, but she does not say anything else that I can hear. I hurry back to the spice aisle and pick up my box of chili powder and go to the checkout lanes. They all have lines.

  In my line there are five people ahead of me. Three women and two men. One with light hair, four with dark hair. One man has a light-blue pullover shirt almost the same shade as a box in his basket. I try to think only about color, but it is noisy and the lights in the store make the colors different than they really are. As they are in daylight, I mean. The store is also reality. The things I don’t like are as much reality as the things I do like.

  Even so, it is easier if I think about the things I do like and not about the ones I don’t. Thinking about Marjory and Haydn’s Te Deum makes me very happy; if I let myself think of Emmy, even for a moment, the music goes sour and dark and I want to run away. I fix my mind on Marjory, as if she were an assignment at work, and the music dances, happier and happier.

  “Is she your girlfriend?”

  I stiffen and half turn. It is the woman who was watching Emmy and me; she has come up behind me In the checkout line. Her eyes glisten in the store’s bright light; her lipstick has dried in the corners of her mouth to a garish orange. She smiles at me, but it is not a soft smile. It is a hard smile, of the mouth only. I say nothing, and she speaks again.