by Cat Rambo
Mimes were still unpopular.
People thought, and thought again, before they said anything. Therapy sessions often consisted of fifty minutes of silence, therapist and patient staring at each other, signaling with raised eyebrows, hesitant smiles, gentle nods, and at times inexplicable tears signaling some breakthrough.
The scientists wrote furious notes to each other, denouncing various theories for the shortages. Jeanne Dixon predicted that the San Andreas Fault would open and Elvis swagger forth, flanked by Jim Morrison and John Lennon, bringing with them new supplies of color and sound that would swell forth across the world like a nuclear explosion of color, expanding outward in concentric rings in a single joyous shout while the Angel Gabriel blew back-up saxophone.
“Silence is silver,” read the billboards. “Walk softly and carry a big gray stick.”
3.
When imagination began to ebb, the government again took active measures. Some philosophers and scientists pointed out that in order to solve the problem, creative thinking would be necessary. Death squads were immediately dispatched to their houses.
But still, overall there was a surprisingly lack of protest, if anyone had bothered to think much about it. Polls showed no one cared enough to vote.
Sure, it sounded good to protest creativity’s absence, but there were benefits to not thinking too hard. Pluses to not worrying about things too much.
The television programs were still the same, after all: a black and white flicker, with dialogue in a slow scroll along the bottom of the screen, hazy snow hovering around the edge as through to signal the arrival of some gray winter of the soul.
I originally wrote this flash piece the summer of 1991 in Baltimore. It was a response to the gas crisis of the time, and recently became pertinent again. After its appearance in the collection, it was reprinted in Triangulations.
Rare Pears and Greengages
Lily:
Violet is one of the halfies—mixed blood. Don’t no one talk much about where they come from, mostly whores who took on too many Fair Folk. Means a nice purse for the lady, and then the fairies educate the baby and bring it back here. Why they don’t stay in Fairyland, I don’t know, but I know Violet don’t call it Fairyland, and gets pissy-like if she hears me say that. It’s the Old Country to her.
Violet sleeps in the same cold servants’ room as me, where the wind whistles at night, like knives coming through the walls, but she don’t seem to mind, not that nor eating cabbage and bone soup like me and Cook, nor not having no money of her own. Her wages goes to the King and Queen of the Old Country, she told me once.
Mr. Smith pays a lot for her because the nobs like maids and butlers with fairy blood. But he don’t have to spend on her room and board, any more than mine, so she shares my room, up at the top of the stairs.
She comes to me after Mr. Smith has been up the stairs and gone again, leaving a shilling on the bed stand. It hurts, deep down inside, and I’m crying, not even worrying about saving the tears. It’d make him mad as thunder, seeing all them tears sliding down to soak into the blanket. Violet catches them, though, in the little bottle she wears around her neck. She whispers to me and hugs me and it’s nice, so nice that I don’t mind her taking my tears. Better her than Mr. Smith.
He don’t come to her. I heard him talking to his friend, Mr. Ryan, about it. “Give me the creeps, that one,” he said. “I think she doesn’t bother breathing unless someone is looking at her.”
Mr. Ryan laughed, nasty-like. “Doesn’t matter so much between the sheets, does it?”
“Be like swivving a fish. That clammy. And worse—a dead fish, since they don’t move.”
He ain’t always so picky. Sometimes he does a vampire girl down at the mill when he’s been there inspecting it. I can tell—he comes back from those trips with a stink of old blood clinging on him. But he never comes to Violet.
When she first started a year ago, I said, “You’re Violet and I’m Lily. A regular boo-kay. Like sisters.” She looked at me blank as an empty window and I gave up on any visions of that right quick. But on these nights when she creeps into bed aside me and touches me with her cold fingers, it takes away all the bruises Mr. Smith left.
She whispers in my ear, “Maybe you’ll have a baby, Lily” and the moist words are like ice water spilled down my spine. I’d lose my place if I did, sure as Sunday. I’d lose my place and no other respectable establishment’d have me.
“No,” I whisper back. I fumble to light the candle end and find the bottle of vinegar and water. I try to wash all trace of him, all nasty slimy trace of him, off me while she watches. The wind shrieks and whistles like it was screaming No over and over, and it’s cold, so cold.
“Maybe,” she whispers again as I get back into bed. It makes me want to slap her face, ghost-white as a cellar mushroom. She never smiles, but sometimes there’s a spark behind her eyes. A little spark, like when you set flame to paper, and don’t know whether it’ll glow and go out, or leap up in flames. Is Violet a glow or a leap? I have no idea, and so I don’t say nothing, just pull the blanket around me.
I think about the lady next door, the foreign one, the one that looks so sad. What about her? Leap or glow? Violet tucks her pointed chin into my shoulder and lies against me, cold and solid as a stone. She wraps her skinny arms around me, but I don’t feel her breathing.
Mela:
The Colonel Sahib came to me and said come to England with me, and I will teach you how to read, and you can return someday and teach your people.
I came, but not to learn. I came because the smell of the acacia trees, the way sunlight combed through the long grass, the grunts of the cheetahs chasing down an antelope all made me think about my son, grief like a spear in my side.
I would go to England and learn Iron and Progress and the death of the baby Jesus and how to forget. I made my goodbyes to the Elephant People and the Hyena People, but I did not tell my clan, the Lion People, what I was doing. They knew, they caught word of it, but they did not approve, and pretended that the goodbye did not exist, as is our custom when there is something we do not want to say.
I came to London, where the air smells of smoke and despair. There were people like me, who walked as animals, the Colonel Sahib said, but only in one form—wolves. And in the twenty years he’d been in Africa, in Nakuru with me, they had become the pack leaders—the upper crust, he called them.
“Demmed if I know just how they managed that, but they’ve made it clear enough they’ve no wish to associate with the likes of us, old girl.” He patted my head awkwardly. “I had thought to find you more company. But since the fairies came, everything’s topsy-turvy. The streets are full of Fruit addicts.”
I said I didn’t mind and I didn’t. My own people reminded me too much of my dead son, and other animals reminded me of my people. Now I go into the courtyard in the back of the house and sit smelling the frozen earth and watching the little sparrows flutter the complicated patterns of their wings and cock their heads, one side, then another, to examine the snowy gravel.
A gate in the garden wall leads next door. Originally the houses had been owned by a pair of brothers, the Colonel said, but they had moved on and now the gate between the houses was locked and curling plants grew along the bars in the summer, blue, odorless flowers kissing the space between them. I walk through the dead, icy grass and it leaves tear trails on my gown’s hem, lines of black against silvery-gray, to look into the other garden.
Another woman sits there. Her hair is piled atop her head in a messy mass like a thorn-weaver’s nest, and her clothing is white and filmy. The old Mem Sahib, the Colonel’s wife, died in a garment like that after three years in Nakuru. A nightgown. This woman is alive, sitting humming to herself as though the sunlight were warm here, as though there were no wind or snow.
I do not make a sound, but she turns to me nonetheless. Her eyes are dreamy, a madwoman’s or an addict’s, or both.
“Who are you?” s
he says.
“My name is Layla.” I stare at her through the bars.
She is a little dik-dik of a woman, but she shows no fear of me. She stands and comes over to the gate.
“You’re not human,” she says, looking at me. “One of them, one of the funny people, like the wolves or the fairies or the vampires, all come out of hiding.”
Her breath smells of vanilla and her eyes are all pupil. She sways where she stands, and another woman darts out from a doorway, a maid, dressed in magpie black and white, to slide her arm around the first woman, supporting her.
“Leave me be, Lily,” she says, pushing her away. “I’m human,” she tells me. “I’m Arabella Smith. Why are you here?”
“I remind the Colonel Sahib of my homeland.”
“And who reminds you of your homeland?” she demands, swaying again. The maid says something, but Mrs. Smith ignores her still. The maid is small and plain-faced and smells of sweat and soap and watery soup. Her hands are red and rough, and when she sees me looking at them, she pulls again at Mrs. Smith’s sleeve.
“No one,” I say. “I do not want to be reminded.” A sparrow flutters too close and I slap a hand out, leaving only a smear of feathers and blood. Arabella Smith does not notice, but the maid does, and her eyes are wide as she looks at me.
Lily:
We all run errands at the same time, or try to, the other housemaids and I. For one, it’s safer. Men don’t come looking so eager if they know they’ll find you in a group, and anyhow the streets ain’t safe. Betty knows a girl who got abducted, taken away into white slavery, and never seen again. I ask how she knows it was white slavery she was abducted to then. Tabitha says she knows for a fact witches come out at night and grab people, fly them up in the sky and drop them for the fun of it.
Betty gets cranky at that point and says maybe it was white slavers or maybe it was witches but the important thing is that she got taken and no one ever saw her again.
And that’s the main point, really, of going together. Gossiping and telling each other all the little bits—whose mistress done what to who. Tabitha’s not here one day and when I ask about her, no one will say nothing in front of the others. I get it out of them in whispers, crumbs at a time.
“She got in the family way.”
“Missus found out and she were that angry.”
“Said she’d have no doxies or children of sin in her house and threw her out.”
“But Tabby had enough saved for coach fare back to Sussex. Said she’d keep house for her brother and her mum.”
“Think her mum will let a disgraced woman in? I don’t. I wouldn’t.”
At least she had that chance. What can a woman do if she has no family? Become a whore. That’s the only door open to me if Violet’s whispered words come true. “Maybe you’ll have a little baby,” she says in my head. Tears start to my eyes, but I fight them back. No sense wasting them.
Some women get hired to cry in the Weeperies. They say it’s a cushy pull while it lasts, but you must cry on command, or be so soft that the Weepery can start you off by telling you sad stories or killing kittens. No one lasts long, though. They end up dry-eyed and hard-hearted as stones, while their tears get shipped off to Fairyland. The Old Country. How can it be old, when no one knew it existed until a few years ago?
I remember that day, when folks came running in to say one of the Parliament Members had said he was a fairy, and then suddenly it all came out, there was fairies an’ werewolves and all sorts of creatures, all around us. They’d been around us all the time.
One of my errands today is the Fairy Market. It’s down Threepenny Lane, near the river. Tents all jumbled and confused and everything glittering, glittering, shiny, the minute you come near. Glimmers of light, gone if you look straight at them. Ghosts of shapes. Goblins with their funny cat eyes, squinting against the sunlight.
I have two bottle of tears in my basket, and when I enter the market, the vendors swarm me, pulling at me to look here, look there, pinching me if I don’t move quick enough to suit them.
They shout, “Rare pears and greengages, pomegranates full and fine, figs to fill your mouth, citrons from the South.” I pick out two peaches, soft and juicy, warm as if they were full of fever, one for each tiny bottle.
At home, Mrs. Smith takes the peaches greedily and vanishes into her room. When she can’t get fairy fruit, she drinks laudanum and vanilla, but the fruit is most to her liking. She’ll be lost in dreams for days. Time enough to cry more bottles full, to buy her more fruit. I sniff my fingers, and smell the peaches, sweet and lush, and imagine their skin, soft and furry as mice.
____________________
Mela:
Some afternoons, the dreamy-eyed, rumpled woman suns herself in the courtyard. I sit near the locked gate and tell her stories, the ones I whispered to my cub, long ago with the warm mud under our bellies and the blood of a fresh kill on our lips.
I tell her stories of crocodiles and storks, and the sinuous pythons that search through the acacia branches. I tell her how the little basilisks live on the insects and dormice they can stun, and how they dig their underground nests to lay clutches of eggs that may stay there in the dark and dirt for a decade or more before the eggs crack and their moist contents crawl out, bellies dragging in the dust, to make their way back to the safety of one of the big trees, its canopy grown up far past the depredations of elephant and giraffe.
Sometimes the maid Lily sits with her. The other one, the one that is part fairy, pays me no mind and I pay her none in return. I have seen her kind before, dealers in scraps, trying to buy the affection of their full-blooded kindred. She has her own thoughts, her own mysteries to contemplate. But the other, the human one, sits listening, wide-eyed. She thinks I am a great sorceress come from Africa. When I tell the story of my son, of how I nested him in a thorn-thicket every day when I hunted, to keep him from danger, she listens. She never asks what happens next and I do not tell her.
Lilly:
The first month my bleeding don’t come and I tell myself it’s because I don’t eat much. Then it don’t come again, and again.
I try to ask the other maids what they would do without letting on why. I know whores do something, something to make the baby go away, but I also know it’s a sin. I don’t know what to do.
Violet lies in my bed, and puts her hands on my stomach and sings. She brings me all her food, don’t save so much as a scrap for herself, and so I let her touch my stomach. Her singing goes all through me, like something humming out from her hands.
“I can hide your growing belly,” she whispers to me. “And when the baby is born, I can take it away where it will be happy. It’ll only cost twelve pounds.”
“The Missus will notice,” I say. “Or Mr. Smith.”
“I’ll take care of them,” she says, her eyes gleaming like candle flames while the wind shrieks. “And Cook won’t say anything. Can you get the money?”
“Where will you take my baby?”
“To a place where they raise babies and educate them. Fine people run it, generous and wealthy. Your baby can learn to be something other than a servant.”
I sell my best clothing and my mother’s necklace, and that with all the shillings Mr. Smith has left beside the bed comes to a little under eleven pounds. Violet is angry—she rummages through my things, looking for something else to sell, but finds nothing. Finally I cry for her, and she catches the tears in her bottle, several spoonfuls worth, and smiles before bringing me a cup of water.
As the weeks pass, I cry more and more. Violet takes the tears away and comes back with fruit, knobby melons and glossy limes. She gives Cook something to put in Mr. Smith’s soup, and he dreams his way through the days like the Missus. Cook doesn’t like it much, but when Mrs. Smith is doped on fairy fruit, she gives Cook no trouble in the kitchen, and when she’s not, she orders two puddings a night and changes her mind on the meat on a regular basis, right after Cook’s just finished the market
ing.
I grow bigger and bigger, I float my way through the house like a cloud, carried along by Violet’s song. I think she gives me fruit as well—the weeks pass too quickly, too quickly, and then one nightmare of a night I dream my belly splits and I wake up in the middle of blood and soreness. Violet is wrapping up the baby in my coat.
“Give it to me,” I say, but she holds it away.
“It’ll just make you miserable later, trying to remember,” she says. “I’m taking her to a nice lady, Mrs. Sucksby. She’ll give her a good life.” She gives me a glass of water, so sweet I know there must be fruit juice in it, just a spoonful or two to send me back to the coolness of the pillow and dreams of sleeping a thousand years, like Sleeping Beauty, with all them plants and thorns.
In the morning Violet and the baby are gone, but I am still sore. Downstairs everyone is cranky, but there is no fruit, and no tears in the house. I cannot cry no matter how much Mr. Smith raises his voice or hand. Finally he sends for the physician, who comes and leaves behind a blue glass bottle. More laudanum.
Mela:
I smell the birth on the wind and it makes me restless. On the night my cubs were born, the rains were just starting. The clouds were low and lightning played over them as though the storm were thinking, dreaming. Then rain fell in sheets bending the grass flat, drops as warm as blood.
All my babies were born dead except my son. I was prepared for this. My people do not live long, and we are few. But he lived, and I washed him clean, there in the torrents of rain, my tongue and the warm water sluicing away the afterbirth.
The Elephant Women and the Hyena Women came to look at him and congratulate me, for their children are few as well. Three groups rule the lands where the acacia trees grow, the Elephants and the Hyenas and the Lions, because we walk most easily between the land of humans and the Real World. There are lesser beings there—we have fairies too, but they are little, malicious things, and rarely come down from the branches.
