Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  “Capricorn,” said Virginia faintly, veering with Ms. Schermerhorn’s erratic breeze, trying to imagine a universe in which astrological and theological forces governed earthly events in harmony.

  “Of course, the truth is, I may not actually even be a Scorpio, because, the trouble is, I was born at midnight — isn’t that just fantastic? — between two astrological signs! Scorpio and Sagittarius! Which accounts for my split personality. I mean, you know, the tremendous tugging deep inside, like the two lobes of the brain? I mean, like, basically I’m a right lobe person, artistic, creative, only sometimes — it’s really wild! — I feel all rational and businesslike.” Cherry Peaches chuckled a warbling little chuckle, and another wave of brilliance washed over the shrinking walls of the kitchen.

  Virginia made an effort to get back on course. “You want to bring the kids closer to God, is that it?”

  “God?”

  “You said you came from the church, right? The retreat is to get closer to God?”

  “Oh, God. Well, naturally.” Cherry Peaches laughed out loud. The joke was on her. “Well, that’s what a retreat is, basically speaking. One long prayer. Like a week-long meditation on our relationship to the universe. To God! To angels and principalities! To seraphim and cherubim!” The radiance in the kitchen doubled, tripled, became celestial.

  Virginia put a demurring hand into the dazzling air. “You want to bring them here and camp out, is that it?”

  “Oh, yes, we do, that’s it exactly. It’s the high-school group. You know. They get really turned off by organized religion, so we have this special group that meets on Sunday nights, and we have, like, speakers, and we do all sorts of fun experiments, and of course we have snacks and cider, and you know, cookies.”

  Virginia was mesmerized by the cozyness of the word cookies as it popped coyly from the lips of Cherry Peaches. Putting her hand over her eyes, she tried to clear her head. “Experiments?” she said.

  “Oh, sure. We try anything and everything. You know. Speaking in tongues, dance, yoga, biorhythms, adolescent-anxiety-oriented behavior-modification. You name it. It’s all really just so fabulous.”

  Virginia shook her head vigorously. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry, but no.”

  “The last week in August. So they can get their heads together before school.” In solipsistic rapture, Cherry Peaces gazed inward at her pilgrimage of youth. “Role playing. We’re going to do a lot of that. You know. Acting out.”

  Virginia had to stand up and take her by the shoulders. “Listen, I said no. You can’t come here for a Sunday school retreat. No, I said. No, no.”

  “Oh,” said Cherry Peaches. Her expression was transformed. Her great square eyes sparkled with a new kind of greed. The radiance in the kitchen coalesced into a beam of light and focused itself on Virginia. “I didn’t understand. There is some …” John was rattling past the window again with the electric lawn-mower. “… and bitterness. Oh, how well I understand. Oh, I’d just love to talk with you. I mean, like, we could work it all out. I mean, after all, what am I here for? Oh, I’m so glad I came today. I could come over any time and we could just, you know, sit down. We could take a long walk and just let it all hang — I mean, us Scorpios got to stick together, right?”

  Virginia led the way into the narrow hall and opened the screen door. “I think I’m Taurus, as a matter of fact.”

  “Listen,” said Cherry Peaches, pausing on the doorstep, “you know what my horoscope said this morning? About today? My forecast for today? It said us Scorpios should go out and conquer the world! So hop on your white horse, Virginia, and gallop off into the wild blue yonder! This is the day! Hurray!” Waving her arms overhead, Cherry Peaches Schermerhorn plunged away and capered in the direction of her little red car. Climbing in, she thrust her beaming face out the window and waved her arm. “Any time you say. I’ll be back anyway, with Arthur. He’s just dying to talk to you.” Pumpkins brimmed and tumbled on the edge of the car window. “We’ll come for tea! I’ll bring the cookies! Hurray for us Scorpios!” Cherry Peaches turned her car around in exuberant dashes, tooted three jolly blats on her horn and went bucking down the driveway.

  “Actually, I guess I’m Pisces,” moaned Virginia, turning away, going back indoors, yearning for a dry gulch in some empty desert where she could hide, where there was nothing for hundreds of miles but prickly dry cactus and mean little horned toads — no luxuriant jungle growth, no copulating elephants, no thrashing in the tall pampas grass. The radiance had vanished from the kitchen. The room was dark and filled with gloom. Virginia stood at the window and looked out at John zigzagging across the lawn behind the electric mower in the light of the blazing sun as it rolled onward through the heavens against the zodiac of stars, producing changes of fortune in the lives of the inhabitants of the planet Earth, propitious days for journeys and business ventures and fortunate encounters with prospective mates.

  “Did you see John cutting the grass today?” said Barbara.

  “Yes. He did a good job,” said Virginia. “He did the whole thing, edges and all.”

  “Then you didn’t see —? I was upstairs, standing on a ladder, sanding the guest room ceiling. I had a good view of him from above. He cut it twice. The front lawn.”

  “He did? Twice? What did he do that for?”

  “He was writing a word in the grass with the little electric mower, running it up and down the hill, making these big letters. I could read it plain as day. But then he got out the big mower and roared right across it from left to right and right to left, and the word disappeared.”

  “A word? What word was it?”

  Barbara looked at her. “It was a name, as a matter of fact. John was writing your name on the grass. Virginia, it said, as plain as day, right there on the front lawn.”

  Thirty

  SOMETIMES BARBARA THOUGHT SHE COULDN’T DRAW ANOTHER breath. It wasn’t just Buddy, although he was bad enough. Everything else was crowding up against her too, plucking at her, like the long fingers of thorny bramble at the bottom of the lawn, reaching out from the wilderness into the grass. Blackberry canes were popping up among the new little white pines. Artemisia Silver King was galloping through the round border like a Mongol horde. There were squash beetles all over the zucchini. Now there was this man. What did he want, sitting there in his seersucker coat? Barbara’s chair was tipped awkwardly to one side on the front lawn. Irritably she swatted at the fly that kept settling on her face.

  From the stone steps under the arching yew, John couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he was aware of them in the front yard — Virginia slouching in her chair, gazing at her feet, Barbara bolt upright (she was angry, you could tell), the man talking and talking.

  It was John’s day off. His natural history notebook lay in his lap. He was checking up on the hornet’s nest in the hedge. He had guessed at its diameter and noted it down. He had drawn a picture.

  There was a shiny new hornet only three inches from his nose, crawling on a dead yew twig, opening and closing its wings, drying them, preparing for its first flight. It was queer, thought John, that the hornet was so near to him, there in the bush, and yet at the same time it was really so far away. Its insect intelligence was so remote, the hornet might as well be on some planet in a distant galaxy.

  The hornet came closer. John sat very still, gazing at its infinitesimal face. It wiggled its antennae, cocked and uncocked its narrow wings. What was it thinking? Did it see him? Was it amazed at being born? Was it saying to itself, So this is the world!

  No, no, it didn’t really think at all. John knew he was putting his own thoughts into the hornet’s brain, and that was wrong.

  The hornet crawled closer still, and settled down again in a wobbling splotch of sunshine, moving its abdomen up and down, stroking one of its wings with its hind leg. John sat motionless beside it, trying to sink into insect nothingness, to know only urges, instincts, hungers and desires. Sex, he thought. Hunger and sex. Hunger and sex. Se
x. Sex. Sex.

  Impatiently John jumped up. His notebook flopped down, jarring the hornet, which promptly flew at him and stung him cruelly on the forearm.

  It hurt like hell. John swore under his breath, “Oh shit,” and ran angrily indoors. He put a paste of baking soda on the red welt, then made himself a thick corned-beef sandwich and bit into it savagely.

  Hunger and sex. Well, at least he could do something about hunger.

  The man sitting on the fragile dining room chair on the lawn was the chairman of the Lincoln planning board. He sat in the dancing shade of the blowing laundry, his light hair lifting in the warm wind, talking mildly about the possible change in the course of Route 126 to eliminate the dangerous reversing curve.

  Virginia was paying only listless attention, but she heard soft phrases: “… slippery conditions … schoolbuses, oncoming cars … no visibility … killed or maimed for life … schoolbus accident in Wisconsin last winter …”

  “The other side of the road,” said Barbara, waving a dirty hand. “Why don’t they straighten it out on the other side of Route 126? There aren’t any houses there. Just woods. Why do they have to come up our driveway?”

  “Conservation land over there,” said the man smoothly. “I doubt very much it can be touched.” Taking a map from his pocket, he unfolded it. His hands were very clean, his fingernails immaculate. He ran his silver pencil along a dotted line.

  “But that’s here,” said Barbara angrily. “That’s right here.”

  “Oh, no, it wouldn’t touch the house. Of course not.”

  “But it would be jammed right up next to it. Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?”

  “Forty feet away. The zoning laws require a forty-foot setback.”

  Barbara whirled in her chair and stared at the round garden, where upended baskets were shading tender transplants from the sun. She saw the garden transformed into a macadam wasteland, blurred with speeding cars, whining with accelerating engines, the whole house shaking with the vibration from the wheels of giant trucks. “How big would the new road be? How wide? As wide as the old one? As wide as that?”

  “Oh, yes. More or less. Well, to be precise about it, I expect they’d want to make it safer.” The man put his pencil back in the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket. “They’d add a passing lane. On both sides, of course. You’d have to have a passing lane on both sides.”

  “Four lanes? You’re talking about a four-lane highway going right up our driveway?”

  “I expect so. I guess that’s what they’d be likely to come up with.”

  Virginia looked up as the man from the planning board folded his map and tucked it away. She could feel his caution, his reasonableness, his courage in tackling the thorniest of the abuttors. Calmly now he was mentioning eminent domain, almost dreamily, in a dangling clause that had no subject, as if it were something that existed only in the passive voice.

  At the bottom of the lawn a flock of birds was flying up into the oak tree in the same way, as if they had not chosen to do it, but were merely drawn upward by some sort of gentle suction.

  Looking down again, Virginia closed her fingers over the hickory nuts in her hand. She had found them piled in a small cairn under the tree from which they had fallen. They had been cracked open. Inscribed on the hard ivory surface inside each of them, as if by the gnawing of an insect, was the letter V.

  Thirty-One

  “STALLED BERMUDA HIGH,” SAID THE WEATHERMAN AT CHANNEL 4, standing in front of his satellite picture, pointing to the clear outline of the east coast. “Scattered showers tonight. Looks like a long spell of hot weather. No relief in sight.”

  The dog days of summer had arrived. The city of Boston was bathed in humid heat. Mosquitoes crept through cracks in screens, droned against ceilings, dove with piercing whines to fill themselves with blood and drift upward again, escaping the blind slap in the dark. In the fetid dampness other insects grew colossal. Weird creatures batted against the windows. Cockroaches infested town houses on Beacon Hill and three-deckers in Somerville. At Walden Pond the beach was crowded with bathers, city-dwellers escaping the furnace heat of their apartments, the sweating upholstery, the mildewed carpets, the tumbled sheets. In Waltham an enraged husband, driven insane by a surly wife and a household of sniveling children, snatched up a shotgun, murdered his family, and roared out into the street, firing random shots at a world that had driven him — only a little while ago a strapping, happy-go-lucky kid — into this corner of hell.

  UNEMPLOYED TV REPAIRMAN

  KILLS FIVE

  STILL AT LARGE

  Even with her eyes shut, Virginia knew there were no stars. Her shoulder above the sheet could feel the thick mist, and now and then there was a patter of water from a movement of air in the drenched leaves. Lifting her head, she stared at the curtain over the east window. It moved slightly, then hung slack again. Even in the dark she could see the watered-silk pattern change as the curtain responded tremulously to the slight breath of the wind. Captivated, she got out of bed and went to the window to touch the miraculous gauze. But of course it was only cheap stuff puckered at the hem. She had run it up herself on the sewing machine. Virginia glanced through the curtain at the window that was John’s, and was surprised to see a pale face looking back at her. The face withdrew.

  Virginia went back to bed. There had been a great grey moth at the window last night before she came upstairs, one wing marked with a livid V in powdery blue chalk. Virginia smiled and went back to sleep, feeling a momentary sense of safety, a benign complicity in her surroundings, a moth’s protection against the enemy.

  Thirty-Two

  BUDDY POOH-POOHED THE MENACE OF THE FOUR-LANE HIGHWAY. “I’ll talk to the people on the planning board,” he said. “Nobody’s going to come past your house with any four-lane highway. I’ll go over their heads. Way over their heads. Wait till Howie gets elected. I happen to know he’s got somebody really great in mind for Public Works. Don’t worry about a thing.” Buddy said nothing about the likelihood that the new administrator for Public Works would be a guy named Clarence Whipple, but it was in the cards. “Not till after your little deal goes through, of course,” Croney had said. “We’ll just get that taken care of first.”

  “There’s Muffy Weatherbee, too,” said Barbara. “She was on the phone this morning. She’s discovered our house was nearest to Thoreau when he lived at Walden Pond. She’s all excited about Jacob Baker, who lived here then. She wants to spruce us up and put a marker on the road and open us up to tourists. She’s coming over. I couldn’t stop her.”

  “Oh, that’s no problem either,” said Buddy. “The Historic Sites people won’t want it. I mean, look at it. There’s nothing architecturally interesting about it. Just another old farmhouse. No fancy moldings or anything like that. I’ll write a letter. They’ve got plenty of other places to spend their money on. Leave it to me. I’ll talk to Muffy. Don’t worry about it.”

  But when Muffy Weatherbee came to the house, Buddy had forgotten the appointment. Virginia was nowhere to be seen. John was digging up cedars in somebody’s sheep pasture. Barbara was fortified only by Homer Kelly.

  Homer had dropped in unannounced. He had decided to see for himself what young John was talking about, to sniff the currents in the air, the huffing and puffing that was supposed to be blowing the house down. Walking up the stone steps he looked at the house. Was it really so fragile and ready to collapse? Well, it was certainly shabby and in need of paint. But with forty acres of valuable real estate in their possession it was hard to see what these women had to worry about. Surely they could turn some of it into a really classy development. Half-million-dollar houses. Homer imagined a big sign at the bottom of the driveway, with hand-carved letters in gold leaf: WALDEN ESTATES. Virginia and Barbara would be rich. But then as he paused at the kitchen door, Homer saw Barbara staggering out of the wilderness at the bottom of the lawn. She was carrying a tree stump, leaning backward, hurrying with tottering steps because i
f she didn’t keep up with her center of gravity she would pitch forward. Barbara dropped the stump on a heap of brush and ran up the hill to meet him, her hair wild, her face scratched and dirty. Instantly Homer tore the splendid sign advertising Walden Estates out of the ground and became a partisan to whatever it was that was going on around here — the stubborn refusals, the hanging on by the fingernails.

  Barbara was glad to see him. She made him a sandwich and opened a bottle of beer. Homer leaned back in his chair, beaming at her, his sympathy expanding in the steamy heat, ready to encompass her heartfelt confessions and dire warnings of disaster. They were both dumbfounded when Muffy Weatherbee appeared outside the window and hallooed at them.

  “Jesus Christ, I forgot,” said Barbara, clapping her forehead.

  Muffy was thrilled to find a genuine Thoreau expert on the premises. Enthusiastically she quoted her morsels from Thoreau’s journals about Jacob Baker’s cows. Homer shrank into the background as far as it was possible to shrink in his immensity, and gazed at the miraculous diamond patterns and speckles of light in the shadow of his glass of beer. Then he amused himself by studying Barbara’s visitor, pigeonholing her with ruthless accuracy. She was so nice, that was the trouble. She had never been anything but nice. She had gone from the comfortable protection of a prosperous father to that of a prosperous husband. She was busy as a bee, volunteering in the hospital, running dances for the benefit of the Boston Symphony, the Museum of Fine Arts. Then Homer was transported by a mystical vision, and in a flight of ecstasy he beheld Muffy Weatherbee at home, trotting out the door after leaving a note for the cleaning woman: Don’t forget wash dining worn window where Mops puts dirty paws! Change sheets guest room! Would you mind polishing silver? Thank you! Your check under begonia! See you next week!

  How could you change the woman? How could you smash and destroy the dreadful predictability of her life, the ghastly stereotype? Homer stopped listening to her bright chatter and consoled himself by picturing Muffy Weatherbee in her cunning little wrap skirt and new Topsiders being buried in an anthill in Africa until she was half chewed up, then imprisoned for ten years in the Black Hole of Calcutta, then cast away on a desert island with nothing but a box of matches and a Swiss Army knife. After an education like that, the woman might just possibly turn into a decent human being. As she was now, she was hopeless.