Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  They all ate their cake, and sat around drinking Tina's Russian tea. Thomas had scrunched up Tina's bed pillows to lean against, as he always did; Tina would complain bitterly about it later, but now she lay with her head in his lap and her pink-stockinged feet on her desk and looked blissful. Nick sat at Janet's feet and let her rub his head. Robin and Molly sat at the extreme ends of Molly's bed and conducted a vehement argument about the costuming of The Revenger's Tragedy, diverging into the finances of the College, the intention of the playwright, how hot it was likely to be in Ericson Little Theater in the middle of January, and whether it was difficult to sew velvet.

  Janet found in her mind the words of some of Tolkien's people, discussing the story they were in and how they might end it. Bilbo had thought of, "And they all lived happily ever after until they died. It is a good ending," he had said, "and none the worse for having been used before." "Ah!" said Sam, "but where will they live? That's what I often wonder."

  Janet wondered, too. For four years they would live here. After that, unless somebody made a prodigious and possibly miraculous effort, they would scatter to the four corners of the world, their fellowship broken, and do what all of them had done to be here in this room now: find new friends. It seemed wasteful. Perhaps they could buy an island somewhere.

  Janet looked around the room again, trying to imprint it in her memory, sight and sound and sense: the steamy warmth of the radiator, the worn path in the carpet before the chipped sink, the smell of tea and chocolate, and sage from Nick, and Tina's wearisome white lilac perfume, and a background of dust because nobody had had time to clean the room since the Hallowe'en party. Molly in her Blackstock sweatshirt, with chocolate on her nose; Robin in a red velvet shirt with huge puffed sleeves and tight cuffs, tugging it out of the waistband of his jeans and turning its hem up to show Molly its construction. Tina's long, beautiful legs in those silly pink stockings, her smiling face upturned to Thomas and her yellow hair spread over his lap. Thomas, who caught Janet's eyes and said, "In such a night Medea gathered the enchanted herbs That did renew old Aeson."

  "What?" said Tina, dreamily, not at all in the sharp tone with which she usually speared you if you said something she did not understand.

  "In such a night," said Janet, backing up, "Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love To come again to Carthage."

  "In such a night as this," said Nick, in his theater voice, "When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise, Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls, And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, Where Cressid lay that night."

  "In such a night," said Robin, so softly that after his last loud words to Molly you could scarcely hear him, "Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew, And saw the lion's shadow ere himself, And ran dismayed away. There's an end of your romance, Thomas; what a play to choose."

  "After we take Shakespeare next term," said Molly to Janet, "will I be able to do that?"

  "I think it requires a misspent youth," said Janet, "but a good memory might get you through." She was still looking at Thomas. "I know what you meant," she said.

  "Do you so?" said Robin. "Then say it another way."

  Janet considered, and while she was considering, Nick said, "'True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.'"

  "What?" said Janet.

  "Addison," said Nick, tilting his head back and grinning at her.

  "And was that what Thomas meant?" said Robin.

  "Part of it," said Janet, looking back at Thomas.

  "I hope so," said Robin. "That's a poor thin sort of happiness."

  "That's the eighteenth century," said Nick. "But I thought, we were all pleased to be here so comfortably, each with his mate, and the wind howling outside. All it wants is a fireplace."

  "They have them in Sterne Hall," said Tina, without opening her eyes. "If we get good numbers in Room Draw, you guys, maybe we could get a triple there next year."

  Janet removed her gaze from Thomas in a hurry, and looked at Molly. It was nice that Tina wanted to live with them again next year; it meant they had been succeeding in treating her kindly. But what did they want? And why, after all, if a sixsome with Tina was pleasant, should a threesome be less desirable? People were very strange, oneself most emphatically included. But the mood was broken now, the moment she had wanted to capture whole was past. She raised her eyebrows at Thomas, and Thomas bent his head so that his pale hair mingled with Tina's richer tresses, and kissed her forehead and said something to her softly.

  Tina got up, pulling him by the hand, and preceded him into the little hallway. They came out again carrying the toy stage, and set it on Molly's bed between Molly and Robin.

  Molly's whole face went round with astonishment and then with delight. "Far out! "

  she said. "Janet, you fiend, you were watching me every minute. Look at this!" She lifted out the figure of a woman in a red dress, and another, with yellow hair, in a blue one.

  "She knows how to take a gift," said Nick to Janet.

  "I suppose I'll have to read the play now," said Molly. "Who wrote it?"

  "Christopher Fry," said Thomas. "If you haven't read it, what did you want the stage for?"

  "Because it's miniature," said Molly, still delving among the actors, "and infinitely more interesting than a dollhouse. What's the play about?"

  Thomas looked at Nick, who shrugged; and at Robin, who said, "I cannot read Fry, more's the pity."

  "It's about two people who save each other," said Thomas. He was looking at Tina.

  She was finding out how many of the doors of the set would open and close—all of them, it appeared—but after a moment she seemed to feel his gaze, and looked over Robin's head at him. They really were a most gorgeous couple.

  "From what?" said Tina.

  "Death, and life," said Thomas.

  "I'll get it out of the library tomorrow," said Molly.

  "You'll do no such thing," said Janet. "This is for you to play with during your vacation, not during your finals."

  "All right, all right," said Molly. "Now. Where shall we put it? I don't suppose there's such a thing as an extra desk down in the basement?"

  There were in fact several, in the dimly lit cavern, next to the laundry room, where you could store your belongings over the summer. Molly and Tina argued over which they should take. Janet wandered back into the depths of the room, past derelict gooseneck lamps with their necks twisted unpleasantly sideways, and chairs missing their seats, and chairs missing their legs, and chairs reduced to piles of polished sticks, and rolled-up lumpy mattresses and discarded springs. Against the back wall were stacked pieces of bunk beds; most of them were the familiar iron pieces, but in one corner there was a vast heavy pile of beautiful maple pieces carved with vines and fruit, on one headboard of which some vandal had smeared ERICSON 410 in black paint.

  It's Peg's bunk bed, thought Janet. She was inordinately pleased for a moment, until she realized that this solved nothing. Four-ten had once had a bunk bed in it, that was all.

  She ran her finger along the headboard's carving, and came away with a black smear of dust.

  It was cold in the room, and the voices of the others had gone. Janet turned to go find them, and was met by Robin coming cautiously down the narrow aisle made by bunk-bed parts on one side and discarded drawers sans their chests on the other. He grinned at her and laid one dusty hand on the nearest maple slat.

  "What," he said, "thinking of bed still?"

  His tone was friendly, but there was something intolerable in it—knowledge, conspiracy, invitation—something. Was this what happened when you were walking out with somebody?

  "Go away," said Janet, scowling at him.

  "Molly wondered where you were," said Robin, unsmiling. He turned and went back the way he had come.<
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  Janet let her breath out and wondered if she had made Thomas this mad by asking him if sex with Tina was worth the effects of the pill. It's only Robin, she told herself, and followed him.

  When she got upstairs, the rest of them had just set the new desk up in the narrow hallway with the closets, so that Tina could squeeze past it every day of their stay in Ericson, and complain about it, too. Janet helped them set the theater on the desk. Robin observed that it was very dark in the hallway and went back to the basement to get one of the gooseneck lamps. Robin behaved exactly as if nothing had happened, and Janet decided she would do the same.

  Thomas tinkered with the lamp for half an hour, with tools borrowed from Sharon, and finally achieved a strong yellow light, which he trained on the theater.

  Molly refused to turn it off that night. Janet woke two or three times, and saw, over the hump that was Molly with her pillow over her head, the round bright light shining on the little arrangement of house and garden and cellar and street, where two people were saving each other from death, and life. She might check the play out of the library tomorrow herself.

  CHAPTER 11

  Christmas break began on December 11. Janet spent the first ten days of it with Nick, though she told her parents she was getting a start on her next term's reading. She had no intention of keeping her excursions into adulthood a secret from them forever, but she thought she would like to read a few more chapters, so to speak, before venturing a book report.

  On the evening of the twenty-first, drinking tea in Nick and Robin's dim, dusty room in Taylor, she found herself dismissed until Christmas so that he could paint Ericson Little Theater in peace. He refused her offers to help, with a faint surprise that somehow made it impossible to insist. Janet went home at four o'clock in the winter twilight, trying not to feel sulky. She remembered what Thomas had said to her at the Hallowe'en party. It had not occurred to her that the things she might be excluded from would include such homely and eminently sharable tasks as painting a goddamned theater, nor that the company Nick preferred to hers would be his own.

  The house smelled of tomato sauce and brownies. Janet skulked up the stairs to her room and sat down heavily at her desk. She could make good some of the lies she had been telling her parents by actually doing some of next term's reading, she supposed. She had her complete Shakespeare already, though it would really make more sense to get rid of some of the less exciting stuff, like the astronomy or the introductory essays that came with the Greek literature. She rummaged through the desk to find her list of textbooks, some of which she knew her father owned, and came across Danny Chin's postcard, with its Hertzsprung-Russell diagram on one side and its terse announcement on the other. He had gotten home yesterday. He had not called, and neither had she.

  Janet got up before she could start thinking, and going into her parents' bedroom, she sat on the bed in the dark and dialed Danny's number. His mother answered by reciting the phone number; Janet identified herself, and, having inquired for Mrs. Chin's health and submitted to having her first term's progress at college investigated, asked for Danny; there was the customary delay, because he always had to be rooted out of somewhere, even if it was only a book. Mrs. Chin accomplished this by sending one sibling after another around to find Danny and get his attention. It took only three of them this time, but Janet was relieved when Danny's light voice said, "Hello?" She was beginning to remember that stupid kiss in agonizing detail, and had to suppress a strong desire to hang up the telephone and dive under the bed.

  As usual, the name of the person calling had not survived the chain of children conveying messages. "It's Janet."

  "Hi," said Danny unhelpfully.

  "I got your postcard."

  Since this information required no particular answer, she got none. Rolling her eyes at the ceiling, Janet said, "Do you want to go ice-skating or something?"

  "That would be okay," said Danny, in the judicious tone he used about any suggestion until he was used to it, "but I'd rather go eat onion rings at Sheila's, if you don't mind.

  Dartmouth only has the stringy ones."

  "Skate first, then eat?"

  "Okay."

  They worked out the details. Janet considered asking after Dartmouth, but they had never used the telephone for extended conversation, and there seemed no real reason to begin now.

  He came by to collect her at ten the next morning. Lily, unfortunately, let him in, and bringing him into the kitchen where Janet was brushing Vincentio, she remarked, "Did you have a fight with Nick?" and then ran up the stairs laughing maniacally.

  "Who's Nick?" said Danny, in the resigned tone he always used of Lily. Vincentio skidded across the floor and tried to knock him down, but he countered this move absently.

  He looked just the same: short, sturdy, brown, with a head of silky black hair that seemed not to belong to him. He had gotten new glasses since she saw him last; she wasn't at all sure that gold wire-frames suited him.

  "Somebody I'm going out with," she said. "Another English major."

  "Good." Vincentio sat on the floor and panted; Danny rubbed his ears. "You never did get me to read Jane Austen."

  "Are you going out with anybody?"

  "I never really saw the point of it," said Danny.

  Janet, who had spent the past ten days learning the point of it, looked at him carefully and saw that he meant it. She considered and rejected a number of commonplace remarks, most of which sounded as if they ought to be addressed to a child of ten, not to any of one's peers—let alone the one who had been, until she went to college, the only really perceptive and intelligent friend she had. "Well," she said, "that'll save you a lot of time."

  Danny laughed. "That's the only nice thing anybody's said to me on the subject since I left."

  "You're just backward," said Janet, "are you gay, you don't know what you're missing, I can introduce you to somebody."

  "Yep. Let's go. The onion rings are calling me."

  The onion rings were greasier than Janet remembered them, but served well enough after skating in the icy wind. Over them, she and Danny discussed what college was like.

  Danny would have liked Dartmouth well enough had there been no other freshmen there; his classmates, or at least all the ones in his dormitory and classes, appeared to have been raised in such strict households that they used the freedom of college to get drunk every night, play poker all afternoon, and hang around with whatever sorts of members of the opposite sex their parents had most resolutely forbidden them. Janet suspected that it was these circumstances rather than any really strong character trait that had made him say he didn't see the point of going out with anybody.

  She commiserated with him, which was easy enough to do when the worst trial in her immediate circle was Tina.

  "Oh, well," said Danny, finally looking rather embarrassed, exactly as he had long ago when she asked him how his broken arm felt. "Maybe they'll grow up by the end of the year. Or I'll meet some upperclassmen; or some of the ones I know will realize I'm not bad for a fresher. How's Blackstock now that you're just one of the peons?"

  Janet told him, in considerable enthusiastic detail, until she saw how forlorn he was looking. She had, their entire senior year in high school, alternately begged, cajoled, and ordered him to come to Blackstock. She swallowed an I-told-you-so. "There are some bad things," she said. "Well, some strange ones." In the brightly lit restaurant, with its worn red tabletops and red vinyl seats patched with duct tape, where the two of them had sat every Saturday noon since they were nine years old and if they ate all they wanted it would cost their combined allowances, the events at Blackstock seemed both remote and improbable.

  She told him about Peg and the bunk beds, Thomas and The Romance of the Rose, the abduction of Schiller and the ominous behavior of the chase in the twilight, the horses at Hallowe'en, and the books coming out the windows—her windows—of Fourth Ericson.

  Danny's family were Baptists, of a fairly narrow-minded
sort, which was probably why he had gone away to college, since he himself was a profound skeptic. Janet's philosophical upbringing, with its huge doses of Bertrand Russell and The Skeptical Inquirer, had taken with him far more thoroughly than with her. He sat listening to her with a patient expression on his brown face, but his forehead gradually creased as his eyebrows rose.

  "You been reading too much poetry?" he said. "I knew being an English major would be bad for you."

  "Huh," said Janet, throwing her straw wrapper at him. "My English professor this term was twice the fanatic for evidence the Philo teacher was and ten times as fanatical as the Anthro professor."

  "Evans, right? Sure, he won't let you do criticism without backing it up. But what's in the poetry, Jan? That's what worries me."

  "You think I can't tell fiction from reality?"

  "I think you confuse feeling with fact. Look. Remember when I broke my arm in Chester?"

  Janet nodded.

  "Right when I felt the bone go, I thought the building was laughing at me; I felt like it had gotten me for daring to sneak in there. Well, it wasn't. I felt that way because I was hurt and I felt stupid because I wouldn't have been hurt if I wasn't clumsy. So you thought all those people were menacing because it was dark in there and it's a big echoey place and then they were chasing you. That's one of the things kids have nightmares about; it's probably hard-wired right into the human brain."

  "What about the books?"

  "Is Tina a heavy sleeper?"

  "Yes."

  "So Peg sleepwalked into your room and threw the books out the window and then came down to get them."

  "And the bunk beds?"

  "Maybe you heard her wrong. Maybe she's playing some sort of funny game; she sounds weird to me. If she is playing some funny game, maybe she wasn't sleepwalking at all. Some student acting strange is a lot more likely than a ghost throwing books out a window and impersonating said student, or whatever you think happened."