Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  When she got back to the kitchen Aunt Minnie was already beating the eggs, cutting a lemon in two and squeezing in the juice, and adding the sugar. She took the pitcher of cream from Minnie and put this in the bowl. She didn’t need to measure; she knew just how much. The cream was so thick it wouldn’t pour and had to be dipped out with a spoon. There was one more ingredient. She took the squeezed-out lemon rinds and scraped them with a grater into the bowl—the tiny yellow particles glittered on the surface of the cream like gold dust. Then she began whipping the mixture with a thing that looked like a tiny carpet beater.

  Herma only watched. She had seen Aunt Minnie do this many times, but she was never allowed to help. There was only one thing she was allowed to do, and that would come later. Aunt Minnie bent down into the cupboard and took out the large oaken freezer, with metal fittings and a crank on top. It was slightly damp and smelled like a boat. It had to be kept damp because, like a boat, if it dried out the wooden boards would shrink and it would leak. Aunt Minnie, with surprising energy for so old a woman, rapidly chipped up the ice into sharp and gleaming shards. These she sifted down into the space around the metal cylinder in the center of the freezer, alternating the ice with layers of salt. When it was full she carefully wiped the inside of the cylinder, to be sure there was no salt in it, and then spooned in the mixture from the bowl. It filled the cylinder exactly to the top, although she had measured nothing. Then the crank was fitted onto the top, with its long rotating paddle that stuck down into the mixture. The whole thing was set onto a chair, and another chair put next to it. Aunt Minnie wiped her hands. She was done.

  Now came Herma’s part. She had to sit in the chair turning the crank for a long time. It was easy enough at first, but after a half an hour the mixture in the cylinder began to thicken and the cranking got harder and harder. However you couldn’t stop. That was when it was most important to keep cranking. Herma sat on the chair in her white dress, turning the handle until her arm ached.

  Meanwhile Aunt Minnie busied herself in the kitchen, washing the bowl she had mixed things up in, rinsing off the beater, rinding the whitened lemon rinds on the sink and throwing them away. She never stopped, all day long, and she never seemed to be tired. Some Spaniards came to cultivate the grove, and pick the lemons in the winter, but for the rest she ran the ranch herself—milked the cow, picked the apricots, and groped through the hen coop for eggs. When there was nothing else to do there was always some work in the kitchen. She found a broom and swept up a little sugar that had spilled on the floor, wiped the sink with a rag, and poured water from a glass onto the geranium on the windowsill. While she worked she sang in her blackbird voice. The song came from the same place as the recipe for the ice cream, the sun-baked Neapolitan town of her youth.

  “Chist’ è’o paese d’ ’o sole …”

  Herma knew the song by heart, even though no one had ever taught her Italian, let alone Neapolitan; she knew it just as she knew Spanish, because languages came to her without effort and she breathed them in as easily as she breathed in the warm and clear California air. This is the land of the sun, the song went. This is the land of the sea. This is the land where all words, be they sweet or bitter, are always words of love.

  Aunt Minnie’s voice was only a kind of a croak. And yet the tune could be made out; that is, she didn’t exactly sing the tune, but you could make out from the sound she made what the tune was supposed to be. The song was like a piece of fence wire that had been trampled on and needed straightening. Sometimes Herma hummed it along with her, in an effort to straighten out the fence wire, but Aunt Minnie paid no attention and didn’t seem to notice. She put away the broom and began scrubbing the sink with some cleanser out of a can with a newborn chick on the label. She sang another little bent piece of the song: “Sò doce o sò amare …”

  She looked around to see if Herma was still turning the crank, rinsed out the washrag and hung it to dry, put away the ice bucket and the ice pick, and stood on a chair to replace the rock salt in the cupboard. Herma had to wait a long time for the last line.

  “Sò sempre parole d’ammore …”

  … with a lingering on the double m and the whole word stretched out in a long ritardando—it was a G, Herma knew, although Aunt Minnie only wavered around the edges of this note, never quite hitting it.

  Herma had been cranking for the best part of an hour now. Her arm felt as though it were about to break. Aunt Minnie took the heavy freezer away from her and set it on the sink—even though she was slight she lifted it without difficulty. She unfastened the crank and pulled out the paddle, scraping the ice cream that clung to it back into the cylinder with a spoon. Unlike most people who made ice cream, Aunt Minnie didn’t lick the spoon or the paddle, or in any way sample the exquisite confection she had made. She seemed to have no interest in it for herself, and only made it as some Giotto might make an altarpiece for a Pope, without covetousness and with total artistic objectivity. In fact, it occurred to Herma, she had never seen her eat anything at all, not even a prairie biscuit with butter. Still scratching away at the dimly remembered song out of her childhood, she rinsed off the paddle and left it in the sink. Then, getting onto the chair again, she took down from the cupboard a long-stemmed crystal goblet, the only one like it in the house. In fact, Herma thought she must have brought it with her from Boston, or perhaps from Italy, for there was nothing like it to be seen in Santa Ana or anywhere else in Orange County. There were acanthus leaves on the stem, and around the bowl were cut pastoral scenes of fauns pursuing nymphs, capering goats, and youths with wild hair playing pipes.

  Setting the goblet on the table with a lace doily under it, she found a spoon and scooped out a perfect hemisphere of the ice cream from the freezer. It was a pure and virgin white, with only a faint tinge of gold from the lemon juice and the grated lemon peel. It liquefied slightly at the edges, while the thin glass of the goblet frosted. Herma waited, knowing that what Aunt Minnie was making was not finished yet.

  Aunt Minnie bent over and found a box of strawberries under the sink, selected the largest one, plucked off the green leaves, washed and dried it, and set it base down in the exact center of the ice cream. Then, from the cupboard over the sink, she took down a jar of thin and translucent apricot glaze. She held a spoonful of this over the goblet and turned it. The amber fluid fell slowly over the strawberry, thinned, and spread until it covered the whole hemisphere of ice cream. The lemon-white was transformed to a delicate flesh tone; the pale dome gleamed through the thin golden membrane that clung to it and covered it, with the strawberry, its dappled red now also lightly touched with amber, in the exact center.

  Aunt Minnie handed Herma a spoon which she had chilled in a little ice she had saved from the bucket. She said, “Eat, Girl.”

  Herma ate, while Aunt Minnie stood in the kitchen a little distance away watching her. She spooned around the edges first, dipped away delicately at the glaze, and saved the strawberry for last. Then she raised the goblet and finished the job with her tongue. Aunt Minnie didn’t care about manners: it was not like at home.

  “When she was done Herma offered to wash the goblet, but Aunt Minnie told her, “No, Girl, you shouldn’t wash the goblet. Aunt Minnie will wash the goblet. A person who eats something shouldn’t have to wash the dishes from it. It spoils it that way. And besides you might break the goblet. It’s fragile and it’s very old.” She took the goblet away from her, washed it and dried it, and put it away in the cupboard. Then she seemed to forget Herma completely. Turning her back on her, she got some blacking and a rag and began scrubbing rust spots off the wood-burning stove. As she worked she took up the song again, such as it was, in her scratchy thread of a voice.

  “Chist’ è’o paese addò tutt’ ’e parole,

  Sò doce o sò amare,

  Sò sempre parole d’ammore.”

  10.

  Outside in the bright sunshine Herma untied Delilah from the apricot tree, mounted, and nudged her with her heel
. When she came to the road she hesitated. Then instead of going off toward town she turned to the left, the other way. After a hundred yards or so the road dwindled away to a kind of rocky trail and descended to the river, such as it was in this part of the world; at this time of the year it was almost dry. Delilah picked her way along the sandy river bottom littered with large round boulders. She knew the way almost as well as Herma did. Herma, feeling warm and content in the sunshine and with the ice cream inside her, began humming the old words about the land of the sea and the sun. When she got to the last line she broke out into full song, with all the Neapolitan flamboyance and florid tremolo in the voice:

  “Sò sempre pa-ro-le d’am-more …”

  A little abashed, she looked around. But the river bottom was deserted. The trail went on, skirting the larger boulders and passing now and then through a patch of willows so that the branches brushed against the sides of the old mare. A mile or so farther on down the river bottom was the Old Quarry. The granite had all been dug out years ago, for tombstones, cornerstones for banks, and county courthouses, and now there was only a great oblong hole in the river bottom that stayed filled with water even in the summer. With a little thrill of anticipation Herma imagined herself pulling off her dress, kicking off her drawers, and slipping into the cold and slightly stagnant water with its faint tinge of green.

  But as she approached the quarry she caught a glimpse of something up ahead—something moving. There was another patch of willows at this place along the riverbank, and she urged Delilah up to it with a nudge of her foot and looked through a gap in the branches.

  On the sandy beach by the quarry were five or six men and their horses. They had ridden down to the quarry to go swimming, and now they had come out and were drying themselves in the sun. One man, sitting on the back of a white horse, was wearing a cotton singlet and nothing else. He was young and fair, and his forehead was pink from the sun. Another was a boy about Herma’s age, with damp drawers that came to his knees. His wet hair was plastered to his head. Near him was a man clad in nothing but his shirt, hopping on one foot to put on his shoe; but he was wearing his hat. Another one was stark naked. He had his side turned toward Herma, and he was scratching his head thoughtfully, as if trying to decide whether he was dry enough to get dressed yet. He seemed to decide that he was, for he turned to the place where his clothes were, a few feet from him on the sand. In doing this he turned directly toward Herma, so that the front of his body was visible. He seemed to stare at her for a long time. But she was sure he couldn’t see her; only her eyes showed through the gap in the branches. She remained motionless, watching him with fixity.

  This man, after staring at the trees for a while, seemed to remember that he had been about to put his clothes on, and advanced toward them with a flat-footed and ape-like kind of dignity. He picked them up. The shirt was still buttoned, and he raised it over his head and pulled it down, shaking his arms so that the hands would come out. Something in the middle of his body shook too, and swung back and forth.

  Herma pulled at the bridle and touched Delilah lightly with her heel, and they climbed up the riverbank with hardly a sound. At the top was an orange grove. The old mare’s hooves, which she set down in a leisurely fashion one at a time, made only a kind of whisper in the soft dirt. But a little farther on, when she came out onto the road, she showed an unexpected burst of energy and broke into a trot, so that Herma had to hold on to the stiff mane in order not to fall off. The trot continued down the long road through the orchards. Herma stared at Delilah’s ears, one of which was flopped over and the other upright. She was thoughtful, or not so much thoughtful as reflective, although she hardly knew what she was reflecting about. It was a very general and yet strong and profound kind of reflection. The oddly serene and pastoral, almost Homeric scene at the quarry stuck in her memory. The young man astride the white horse had the air somehow of a warrior out of a fable, clad only in the light singlet as though it were a piece of armor. There was a negligent and kingly air too about the others. The men were strong and calm. They were prepotent. Even though naked, they moved easily through the world and met its gaze with confidence, knowing it was theirs. Herma, still looking at Delilah’s flopped ear, had forgotten where she was. She came into town. It had an odd look, as though a new house had been built, or as though somebody had died in one of the houses and they had pulled the window shades. But everything was exactly the same.

  Arriving home, she turned Delilah loose in the Sampsons’ backyard (Delilah ambled obediently into the shed and stopped there, swishing away flies with the tail), then climbed over the fence into her own yard and went into the house. It was the middle of the afternoon. Papa was away at work, and Mama was “lying down,” as she always said, although she slept so soundly after lunch that it would have taken a cannon shot to awaken her. Barefoot as she was, Herma made no sound as she went upstairs to her room. She took off her clothes—which was a simple matter, since there were only two of them, the white dress and the drawers—and then took a bath; because even she could tell now in the closed bedroom that riding a horse bareback in the summer made a person smell. There was no sound from the bedroom across the hall. Herma splashed in the tub for ten minutes or so. Then she pulled the plug and got out, dried herself carelessly, and went back to her room trailing the towel.

  There was no mirror in the bathroom. That would not be proper, according to the notion of Papa and those of his generation; for what would there be to see in a mirror in the bathroom, except one’s own unclothed body? Papa had never quite worked this thought out even to himself, and yet that was why there was no mirror in the bathroom.

  There was one, however, in Herma’s room. It was an heirloom, inherited from Grandma Harris, and who knows who had owned it before that—it was very old. It was a very large mirror. If it was not in Mama and Papa’s bedroom it was because there was no room for it there, cluttered as the room was with the big double bed, the large chest of drawers with its swelling double bosom, Mama’s dressing table with its collection of bibelots, and a dozen other pieces of medium-sized and small furniture that were deemed necessary for the proper operation of Mama and Papa’s conjugal life. In Herma’s room, which contained only a small iron bed, a kind of chiffonier in which she kept her clothes, and a small square table with wicker legs to put the lamp on, there was plenty of room for the mirror. It dominated the far end of the room opposite the window: a large and massive object with square feet, and a frame something like a picture in a museum. The glass was badly tarnished; there were silver-gray splotches all over it, a long streak at the side like rain falling from a roof, and in the right-hand corner another darkish outline that looked like a spider crawling over a hand. Things looked different in the mirror than they did in the real world—that is, on Herma’s side of the glass. The world on the other side of the mirror was an identical but reverse world in which one’s right hand became the left, the calendar on the wall opposite was written in Chinese, and so on; but even odder than this was the transformation wrought on the atmosphere of the world beyond the mirror by the darkish splotches and discolorations of the glass—a world with a dark enticement to it, a thrill of the unknown and perilous, that could hardly be accounted for by the mere optical facts of reflection.

  Herma looked at the other Herma standing only a few feet away from her in this other world. She saw an adolescent who, as yet, had scarcely any feminine characteristics to her body except for its lack of masculine features, such as she had observed on the men at the quarry. In her right hand (the left hand in the mirror) she was holding the towel, with the end trailing on the floor. Her short hair was still damp from the bath; drops of water gleamed on her narrow shoulders. The skin was as white as alabaster, except that the face and forearms were pink from the sun. In a frontal view such as this the two small bumps on the chest were invisible. The hips were straight as a board, and the feet large, as in all young animals. The mysterious and silvery image in the mirror, if a sing
le thing were only added, might have been that of a boy.

  Herma turned away from the mirror and went to the door. It was closed but not latched. The latch was a screwed-on sort of affair, a small metal box with fluted knob fixed to it. But the screws that held it to the door were loose—they had been for some time—and the latch wouldn’t work. Herma tried to screw them in with her fingernail, to no effect—she only broke a nail. She said, “Oh, drat the thing!” She went to the chiffonier, found a slipper, and jammed it under the bottom of the door. Then, trying the door to be sure it wouldn’t open, she went back to her position before the mirror.

  She looked. There she was, the silly thing, with her narrow shoulders and hips, and a slight frown of concentration marring the smoothness of her brow, staring at her other self as though it were an enemy. She spread her feet slightly on the carpet, and put her hands on her hips. Herma had a strong will, as everybody had noticed. And now she willed strongly, as one might struggle to wrench a heavy stone out of the earth with a crowbar.

  For a while nothing changed; the image in the mirror was the same. She strained once more, with all the force of her body and will. There was a tickling between her legs, a crawling and creeping sensation at that particular hidden place people didn’t talk about. And then it happened. There was an odd slow sound, a kind of soft plop, and a part of Herma turned inside out in exactly the way that you would turn a stocking out. The thing that appeared was about the size, in fact, of a small child’s sock, although as heavy as though it were full of sand. At first it was damp, dark, and purplish like a newborn baby, but after a minute or two it began to fade to a pale rose. And rose was the right word for it too, because the rounded and conical sort of cap on the end was exactly like a pink rosebud about to burst.