Fair Peril

by Nancy Springer

  The dawn hush was rent by a startled and distinctly ranine scream. Buffy looked up and LeeVon was not there.

  “LeeVon?” She saw his black-framed eyeglasses lying on the floor. What was going on?

  “Graaaah!”

  She stood up and leaned across the table to look. A medium-sized bullfrog sat amid a muddle of cotton underwear on LeeVon’s chair, a frog with miniaturized rings crowding its nostrils, lips, eyebrows, and the edge of the flat circle that passed as an ear. A frog with miniaturized tattoos, including an interesting one that Buffy had not previously seen, on its butt.

  “Nice tat! Who is that naked kid? Mowgli?”

  “Buffy, unfrog me!”

  “Well hung! Kipling would be proud.”

  “Buffy!”

  “All right, okay.” Denial, also known as delayed reaction, had always been one of Buffy’s strongest qualities; she was just beginning to mentally process the most recent calamity. “Did I do that? Okay, okay!” As LeeVon emitted an indescribable vocalization, “All right, just chill out a minute. Let me find the instructions.”

  There was a difficulty, however. Adrenaline had jolted her wide awake and snapped her out of her floating sense of not-quite-self; consequently, Batracheios presented itself as bookishly normal to her, a coffee-table volume of annoyingly cute pictures and bad poetry. Buffy spent a full hour going through it page by page and could find nothing on how to turn a man into a frog. Nothing at all. And certainly nothing on how to unfrog him.

  “LeeVon,” she said finally, “let me pick you up. That’s a buddy.” She did so. “Now don’t panic, but I’m going to put you in the aquarium for the time being, to keep you nice and moist.”

  “Graaaaah!” The stud in the end of his four-inch, front-mounted tongue thrashed in the air, catching the light.

  “I said, don’t panic!”

  “Graaaaaaaaah!”

  The frog’s distress, combined with everything else that had gone wrong, affected Buffy with a degree of existential desperation she had never previously attained, angst beyond tears, a despair that smashed right through her armor of cynicism. Woe afflicted her, desolation sufficient to make her stand in the middle of her kitchen with a hyperventilating frog in her hands, throw back her head, and bawl, “Fairy Godmother-In-Law! Fay! Get your droopy patootie over here!”

  Fay never swore. She prided herself upon never swearing. She might not be a lady by some people’s standards of wealth or style or status of birth, but, by gosh and golly, she could, and would, be a lady in deportment.

  However, when that Murphy person’s summons yanked her out of her chair and hurtled her streetward like horizontal bungee jumping, it just slipped out. Fay said, “Damn!”

  Then she detested Murphy worse than ever for making her do that.

  Fay knew herself to be a pro, a minor but longtime practitioner in fair, perilous power. She knew the Murphy person to be an immensely talented amateur. At first, years ago, Fay had been pleased and proud that her son had recognized that talent, had married a woman so much like his old mother. But very shortly she had come to wish he had married Little Bo Peep, a sheep, anything else. It is hard for an old pro when an amateur possesses the untrained power to boss her around. No matter what other considerations might arise, Fay’s goal in dealing with the Murphy person had for years remained focused and simple: to protect her own niche and status, achieved through a lifetime of hard work and political maneuvering (Prentis had learned most of what he knew from her) and sucking up to the Queen.

  Driving faster than she liked toward the unlovely and out-of-whack Murphy residence, Fay thought about all this and said, “Damn,” again—it just slipped out again—which made her furious. Mad enough to commit an act of rebellion. She stamped on the brakes; despite the power of Murphy’s summons wrenching her innards, she wrestled the Eldorado to a stop at the curb. “All right, just a minute,” she grumbled. She wanted to check her purse.

  Hastily she dumped the contents out of her massive gilded bag, then repacked it: all four of her marriage licenses, divorce papers, death certificates. Mirror, lipstick, mascara, eyelash curler, cellulite cream, nose-hair remover. Several sexual hang-ups in the latest decorator colors. Her son’s fraternity paddle. The papal encyclical on birth control. A sheaf of newspaper clippings about various child abuse cases. An inferiority complex, pink. Birth and First Communion certificates for her children. Prom corsage. Emergency-room rape kit. The swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. Checkbook, credit cards, press-on faux fingernails. A box of baking soda. A religious tract on the evils of masturbation.

  Fay frowned. It did not seem like enough, not if she had to defend herself, considering the mood Murphy was in. She glanced around the interior of the Eldorado.

  Some people’s cars are best conceptualized as mobile stereos. Fay’s was not one of those. Fay’s car was a mobile closet.

  Fay smiled. From a stack of old newspapers she selected the one with the article about Murphy’s mother refusing to testify that her husband had assaulted her. That went into the purse. She also jammed in a can of Ultra Slim-Fast and an aerosol dispenser of Strong-To-Last breath spray.

  There. Nothing like emotional baggage to pack a wallop.

  The strength of Murphy’s summons was scrambling her intestines. Necessarily, Fay started the Eldorado and rocketed off again.

  She wondered what the h—Goodness. This had to stop. She wondered what in mercy’s name Murphy wanted. Probably something to do with that twerp Emily. Now, there was another one who bore watching and needed to be put in her place.

  Whatever the problem was, Murphy could just—Murphy could expect no help from her.

  Some people liked to say yes. Some people liked to say no. Fay knew herself to be, as befitted a lady, one of those who liked to say no.

  Speeding toward the Murphy residence against her will, Fay was not ashamed of this trait. She cherished it. It and her purse were going to save her.

  Buffy had forgotten it was Sunday morning. Not that it mattered, but it startled her and blinded her momentarily to see Fay dressed for her weekly glory competition, a.k.a. church: Fay wore a gold acetate, elastic-waisted dress with a gold-on-gold brocade jacket in a fleur-de-lis pattern; she wore gold button covers shaped like butterflies and matching gold earrings; she wore gold mesh nylons and gold spike heels. And, oddly, a white hat. “I would like a portion of respect,” Fay complained as Buffy opened the door. Fay was not pleased.

  “I’m a little out of sorts right now,” Buffy said.

  “Sorts or no sorts, I expect a proper mode of address.”

  “Fine, your Aureateness.” Buffy stood aside to let Fay through.

  “And for heaven’s sake, get out of that dreadful granny gown.”

  “Never mind the nightgown for right now. I’ve got two problems. Number one, Emily—”

  “My problem first!” LeeVon squawked from the aquarium. “My problem first!”

  “Okay, LeeVon first. I turned him into a frog by mistake. How do I unfrog him?”

  Fay gave her an expressively blank golden-eyed stare. “Kiss him.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Duh.” Feeling furiously stupid—as Fay probably intended her to feel—Buffy grimaced but turned immediately to the aquarium and picked up LeeVon. “Pucker up,” she told him.

  “Turn your back,” he begged.

  “How, for God’s sake?” She kissed. “Bleaaah.” But aside from a green taste of aquatic slime on her mouth, nothing happened.

  “That’s odd,” Fay said with the puzzled frown of a hausfrau confronting a cake that has failed to rise. “That ought to have worked. Try it again.”

  “You try it.” Buffy thrust the frog at her.

  “No, thank you.”

  Buffy rolled her eyes and approximated her lips to LeeVon’s once more. Nothing. LeeVon’s throat quivered and he whimpered, jangling his rings.

  “Never mind, sweetie,” Buffy told him. “I’ll get you back somehow. I promise.”

 
“Yeah, well, I’m due at work tomorrow morning!”

  “You can go,” said Fay in bored tones, “but I don’t think they’ll want you manning the desk. I’m late to church.” She turned toward the door.

  Buffy called, “Fay, wait, wait! We have to find Emily.”

  “Are you saying she’s lost?”

  Yes, of course, that was what Buffy was saying. Thoughts of Emily kept making her feel cold. Emily, another body in another smashed car. Emily, another victim of another mugging, or worse—Emily, another bludgeoned and violated young female body reported in the morning paper, a corpse with golden hair, baby-fine, softly shining—so different from this woman’s metallic coif. Buffy knew the fears were silly; Emily was with Adamus, she should be safe, right? Wrong. Emily was with a man from an era when men owned their women like chattels. When a man was a person and a woman was something less and a girl less yet. Emily, another battered girlfriend with nowhere to turn for help. Emily, lost and alone.

  Buffy felt so cold with fear that she could barely speak. “She’s run off with Adamus.”

  “So?”

  Jesus, Buffy thought. Emily, seeing things she should not yet see, doing things she should not yet do. I know where Prentis gets it. “So she’s your granddaughter! Help me get her back.”

  “Why?”

  Good God. “So she doesn’t end up married to a lout at the age of sixteen!”

  “I was married to my first husband when I was sixteen,” Fay said. “Didn’t set me back any.”

  Actually, that explained a lot about Fay. Didn’t set her back? That was debatable, as was any comparison between Emily and this garish golden sweet potato on feet. “Emily’s not like that.”

  “Thanks so much.” Fay grasped the doorknob in her gilded claws.

  “Fay, wait! Do you know where she is?”

  Her fairy godmother-in-law gave her a glittering look, hefted her purse in a very decided manner, and walked out.

  Seven

  “This just absolutely sucks,” LeeVon said. Somehow he had regained his composure and a bleak sense of humor. “Every time I hop, I jingle like a tambourine.”

  Sitting at the kitchen table and poring over Batracheios again, Buffy had to laugh, tried not to, got her insides sloshing like an off-balance washing machine, and started to hiccup.

  “Never mind, Best Beloved.” Atop his eminence of damp brick, LeeVon squatted placidly as only a ranine philosopher can, warmed by the reading lamp Buffy had rigged up for him. “I know you didn’t mean to do it. You know what I think the problem is?” Now that LeeVon had calmed down, he sounded like himself again, only froggily sheepish. “Why kissing didn’t work, I mean?”

  She focused her hiccuping attention on him.

  “I think I need a guy.”

  Since she had known LeeVon, Buffy had been so preoccupied by the exigencies of her own private life that thoughts of his had never occurred to her. What LeeVon did or dreamed in his off time was sublimely none of her business. It wasn’t that sort of friendship. Moreover, LeeVon was—was LeeVon. All such thoughts of him seemed irrelevant. LeeVon, librarian of mythic proportions, with a sexual preference? What he was saying startled the spasms right out of Buffy’s diaphragm and affected her voice like helium. “You gay?” she squeaked.

  “Yes.”

  “You serious?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  The friendship had moved, Buffy realized, into a new level. He trusted her. Look what she had done to him, yet he trusted her.

  “Consequently,” he added, “it can’t be just any guy.” His voice turned coy. “I like them young and cute. And, of course, he has to be one of my kind.”

  She started to laugh again, this time with relief. “Well, that’s the answer, then. It’s gotta be. So who can I take you to? You got a, uh, a steady?”

  “No.” His voice had quieted. “No, I wish I did.”

  “Is there, uh, anybody?”

  “Not really.” He was speaking so softly she could barely hear him. “This town isn’t the best place in the world for a guy like me to meet somebody, Buffles. Not the kind of dude you want to take home.”

  He was telling her, she realized, that he was lonely. She didn’t know what to say.

  He said, “There’s the Pony Ride, and that’s about all. Queens and quickies.”

  The bar in front of which she had found him standing in his underwear, he meant. “So what do I do, take you back there?”

  “Yes.” He brightened. “Excellent idea. Any decent God-fearing queer who could go for me, or vice versa, is going to need some alcoholic fortification before he agrees to kiss me.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Tonight.”

  “No, it’s Sunday, dammit.”

  The bar would not be open. Blue laws. “Shit. Okay, tomorrow night. You can last that long.” Buffy felt expansive with hope that LeeVon would soon be back to—“normal” hardly seemed the word, but anyway, would soon be back. “You want a sandwich or something?”

  “No, thanks. Not hungry. You?”

  She shook her head and leaned back in her chair, staring. There was silence. It was no use to offer to tell LeeVon a story; he was a better storyteller than she was. As talking frogs went, she found him not nearly as satisfactory as Addie. He bellowed no endearing insults at her. He undertook no ranine posturings. Probably he wouldn’t croak at night, either. How boring. Another fifteen minutes had to pass before it was time to go to the phone again. Every hour on the hour Buffy had been calling the Sewell home to ask whether anything had been heard from or about Emily. Nothing so far. On the chance that she might have to go someplace or do something, Buffy had taken a quick shower and dressed—sweatshirt, jeans, running shoes. Other than that, she did not know what to do. Go out and collar people on the street, ask them if they had seen her daughter? But what if Emily called or came to the house while she was gone, what if Emily needed her? After today she could call the cops again and insist that they do something. But the waiting was hell.

  “That witch Fay knows where Emily is,” she said softly.

  “Watch what you say, Best Beloved. The air has ears.”

  The warning was so gentle that Buffy did not bristle. “I don’t care,” she said. “She knows. I swear she does.”

  “I agree.”

  “I detest that kind of adult.”

  “Pardon? The polished-surface kind?”

  “No, not so much that. The kind who says, ‘What was good enough for me is good enough for my progeny forevermore.’”

  “An interesting form of selfishness.” LeeVon’s voice had gone feathery. He hadn’t thought about it before. He didn’t have kids.

  Being LeeVon, he probably didn’t have parents, either.

  Buffy said, “That Brasso bitch. I’ve got to come up with a way to get her to help me.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Yeah. The only way I can think of …” Buffy did not vocalize her thoughts, which were dark, intriguing, and not yet fully actualized. “So what’s it like to be a frog?” she asked after a short while.

  “Frightening. It’s terrifying to be so small and portable. Why?”

  “Portable,” Buffy muttered.

  “Best Beloved, what are you contemplating?”

  “Prentis.” She got up, grabbed her car keys, and strode out.

  Prentis considered that his ex did not understand him, and he was right. The key to Prentis, which Buffy had never imaginatively grasped, was that Prentis had been raised by Fay.

  Part of the reason Buffy did not understand, of course, was that Prentis never talked about it. But that was no excuse. She should have understood anyway.

  Prentis never talked about it because talk about personal terrors was not manly. Prentis barely thought about it for the same reason. Terror, not manly. By an interesting circular sort of entrapment, or perhaps a torment more in the shape of a Möbius strip, Prentis’s chief terror was exactly and precisely that of not being manly. Not muscular enough, not athletic
enough, not aggressive enough, not upstanding enough. Sons of mothers like his, he knew from sixth-grade health class, sons of dominant mothers, mothers whose glare bore physical force, mothers who could turn almost anyone into a quivering jelly of apology with a single whack of the emotional baggage, mothers to whom the word “witch” was not an insult—sons of forceful mothers were likely to turn out not manly. Early in his teens he had learned to be constantly on his guard against an incipient lack of manliness. At any time some sneaking, effeminate emotion might turn him into a sis. He could not let that happen. He studied the masters, James Bond, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart. (With a name like that, the guy had to hang tough.) He learned that masculinity involved total control, and he learned to be in control of himself and those around him, an obsession which led him naturally into politics via the law. Control became his identity, his livelihood, and his armor.

  Only at three in the morning, when his always-and-forever insomnia would not let him sleep, was Prentis likely to admit even silently, to himself—

  No. No, dammit, it was not some kind of sissy fear that sent him pacing around the downstairs in his terry-cloth robe at this obscene hour; it was anger. He was pissed, dammit. At women. Women in general, such as his mother with her killer purse and Emily who used to be his sweet little daughter but now seemed to be turning into a bitch and a whore just like the rest of them, out running around, and Tempestt asleep upstairs, not knowing he was awake and pacing—not that she’d care if she did know. Just as long as he kept the money and the perks coming in, she didn’t care. And Buffy. Specifically, Buffy. God, was he angry at Buffy. Angrier than he was at anyone, because at one point she had actually seemed to love him.

  Tick tock tick tock tick.

  The secret, cat-footed fear was that no one would ever—

  No. No, he was damn not going to think about it. He was pissed.

  The door chimes donged.

  The sound jangled Prentis like a buzzer, freezing him where he was.

  Nerves. Okay, damn it, nerves were always there, right underneath the armor. Partly because of what his mother might do to him—that hag didn’t need her bag of baggage; she could make him wet his pants in public with merely a pensive and affectionate smile—but mostly because he knew who it was. He knew just who was standing on his doorstep. Another one exactly like Fay, only more so—wasn’t that what always happened, that a boy tried to get away from his mother, then ended up marrying her?