Everything was getting harder. They"d tracked me down for school, and now I had to get there an hour earlier for remedial math. Which meant leaving Lisa with Mom for even longer. And Lisa was walking, so if you left the door open she"d head up the ramp and out onto the sidewalk. I"d sit in school and wonder if Mom had gone out to finger some Skoags and left the door open and Lisa had toddled out and been hit by a car. Or worse, just wandered off and I"d go home and call her but she wouldn"t be able to answer . . . My imagining made school hours torture.
I"d race home each day, and each day Lisa would be okay. Every few nights Mom would go out, and I didn"t know what to hope for. That she"d score some slime and come home hummy, but easy to spot as a gropie? That she wouldn"t get any, but then she"d be trying to sign to Lisa and showing off her withdrawal? Maybe that she wouldn"t hear a delivery van coming down the alleys?
It all came together one night when I went to get another envelope from the fat Skoag. The streetlamp was glinting off his skin, and flashing off his voice membrane each time it swelled like a khaki neon light. He was holding out the envelope in a plastic-mittened flipper, but I said, "I need a favor."
"No," he tooted. "No favors." He flapped the envelope at me frantically. He looked toward the alley mouth, but there was nothing there. I took a breath.
I said calmly, like I was sure of it, "You promised Lavender you"d look out for me and the Mom."
"Yes. I bring you the money, every time."
"Yeah. Well, that"s good, but not enough. I need you to come to my house, twice a week, late at night."
"No." He said it fast, scared. Then, "Why?"
"Yes. You know why."
He rocked on his flippers like a zoo elephant. "I can"t," he tootled mournfully. "Please. I can"t. Take the money and go. Dangerous for me."
"Dangerous for me if you don"t. And you promised Lavender."
"I . . . Please. Please. Once a week. Wednesday night, very late. Please."
He shoved the envelope into my hand. I watched him rock. If I demanded it, he"d come twice a week, but he"d hate me. Or he"d come once a week and think I"d let him off easy. "Okay," I said, settling for the second one. I might need something else someday, and once a week would hold Mom together.
He came late Wednesday. It startled me awake, his flippering down the ramp and then slapping the door. Mom had stayed in, looking at her hands and sighing, and gone to bed around midnight. It was two A.M. when the fat Skoag showed. I"d gone to sleep, thinking he wasn"t going to come. Odd. Just the sounds of him coming down the ramp and me opening the door like I used to for Lavender made my heart pound. Like maybe I"d open the door and somehow it would be Lavender standing there, gently waving his flippers and waiting for me.
But it was only the fat Skoag. He was pressed into the darkest corner of the stairwell, staring up at the sidewalk. As soon as I opened the door, he scuttled in and pushed it shut.
"Quickly," he said, pulling off a plastic mitten. "Quickly, please, and then I will go."
"This way," I said, and led him into my mother"s bedroom.
She wasn"t asleep. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. The bed, wedged in a corner of the small room, was a tousled wreck. Some movement of air as we came into the room turned her eyes to us. She stared at us, between dreaming and awake, and suddenly she sat up and screamed "Lavender!"
The word came out crisp and hard and real, like she used to talk. Then she saw it wasn"t him and she broke. She made this horrible laughing-crying sound. The fat Skoag freaked when she screamed and waddled frantically for the door, but I was closer, and I slammed it and put my back to it. "No," I said, gripping the k.n.o.b. "You don"t leave until she"s touched you."
His eye spots went flat and dead. He turned and slowly walked toward the bed. Her hysterics trailed away in broken sobs. I watched her face, her shock fading and being replaced by horror as the fat Skoag came closer. "No," she said, clearly, and then, "Nooh. Nooh." She backed up on the bed, pressing into the corner. "Noooh. Doanwanis. Goway. Bwee. Pease. Trynstob. No." But when the Skoag held his flipper out, she suddenly lunged across the bed and gripped it like a handful of free lottery tickets. She held on and her body jerked in little spasms, like the kid at school who had fits. Her eyes went back and she threw her head way back on her neck and her tongue came out. I felt sick and dirty, like I was watching her have s.e.x with someone, or watching a doctor work on guts. But I couldn"t look away. The Skoag stood there until her hands slid away. They were thick with his slime and iridescent in the darkness. The stuff was thick, like the goop she used to rub on my chest when I was little and had a bad cold. She crumpled over onto her side. I pulled the blankets back up over her. As I let the Skoag out, I wondered why I had bothered to do that.
"Remember," I said, as he waddled up the ramp. "Next Wednesday. It"s important. And you promised Lavender."
I was thinking that Wednesday was about right, because the aid lady always came on Thursdays or Fridays, and Mom would still look okay when she got here. The fat Skoag paused on the ramp.
"For Lavender," he said, like bra.s.s trumpets coming from a far hill. "Only for him would I do this thing. Only for him."
I knew then that the fat Skoag was close to hating me tonight, and that it didn"t have to have been that way. If I hadn"t demanded this, he might have become my friend. I watched the fat Skoag leave and felt p.i.m.p.i.sh and sly and small for trading on his loyalty to Lavender. But I had to, to keep Lisa safe. Sometimes the only thing I was sure of was that Lavender had entrusted Lisa to me. I went back to bed, curling up around Lisa. I fell asleep hoping that the things I did to protect her wouldn"t stain her.
So that"s how it went. The fat Skoag came once a week. Mom stayed slimed and happy. The aid lady never suspected a thing. I went to school enough to keep everyone happy and took care of Lisa. Lisa grew. She turned into a little kid. On Sat.u.r.days we"d bus over to Gasworks Park. I"d push her on the swings or we"d watch the fancy kites people fly there. I kept her away from other kids, so she wouldn"t be teased about being mute. When some mommy would say h.e.l.lo to her, or say, "My, such pretty hair," I"d step in and say, "She"s real shy. And my mom says don"t talk to strangers." Then I"d take her away and buy her ice cream. No one expects kids to talk while they"re eating.
She was three when the message came. The radio was always on for Lisa. Cla.s.sical music made her close her eyes and sway, or suddenly shiver. Jazz made her hyperactive. If I wanted her to go to sleep, it was good old rock and roll. I should have heard about it. But I never listened to the news or wasted food money on a newspaper. So I scowled at the check-out guy when he shoved a Seattle Times into my brown bag.
"I ain"t paying for that," I told him.
"On the house, kid," he told me. "I figure you got a right to know, it being your Skoag and all."
He"d never talked about Lavender before that. He"d treated me decent while Lavender was alive, and he"d never given me a bad time about shopping there after Lavender died. Not like the Laundromat where they threw me and our laundry out because they didn"t want "Skoag slime clogging the drains." Anyway, he turned right away to the next customer so I knew he didn"t want me to say anything. I headed home.
After I got dinner cooking, I unfolded the paper, wondering what I was supposed to look at. The headlines jumped at me. SKOAG PLANET CONTACT CONFIRMED. I read slowly, trying to understand it. The story said the rumors were confirmed, without saying what they were. The big deal was the Skoags officially sending a message to Earth, planet to planet. The newspaper went on about the sending technology being based on stuff we knew but hadn"t thought about using together, and stuff like that. I had to sort through the whole paper to find the last few lines. They scared the h.e.l.l out of me. Sources wouldn"t say what the message had been, but didn"t deny it had to do with the ritual murder of a "highly placed Skoag exile in Seattle."
I didn"t know the microwave had buzzed until Mom set food in front of me. I looked up, and Lisa had already finished eating. I hated it when Mom did stuff like that. Like she was pretending she was a good little mommy, taking care of her kids instead of a Skoag gropie who didn"t give a d.a.m.n. In the drug cla.s.ses at school, they called that "ingratiating behavior" and said junkies and alkies used it to fool their families into thinking they were changing, especially if the families were close to sending them to a cure station. It didn"t fool me. I crumpled up the paper and gave it to Lisa to play with and ate dinner.
Two nights later, the man came. Maybe he thought no one would notice a gray government sedan pulled up in front of a slummy house at midnight. I heard someone nearly fall down the ramp, and when he knocked, I opened the door on its chain.
"Yeah," I said, but my stomach was shaking. Skoag slime dependency wasn"t supposed to show up in pee tests. That"s what all the kids said, and I"d always believed it was true, but what if they"d changed the test and knew from Mom"s pee that she was a gropie? But I tried not to let any of that show on my face as I stared out the crack at the government man.
"I have to come in," he said, whispery. "I have to talk to your mother."
"Too bad," I said, being tough. "She"s deaf. You can write it down, or you can tell it to me, but you can"t talk to her."
"I can sign," he said nervously, echoing with his fingers.
"She can"t," I said, and started to close the door.
"Please," he said, not quite shoving his foot in the crack, but leaning on the door to keep it open. "It"s about the dead Skoag. Lavender. And it"s important, kid."
We stared at each other.
"Look, kid," he finally said. His voice came out normal, not whispery, but real tired. "I can come back with cops tomorrow and kick this door in and drag you out. It"s that important. Or you can let me in now, and we"ll keep this quiet."
My mom reached past me and undid the chain, and the man came in. I hadn"t even known she was awake. She looked awful, with her scarred face shining in the streetlamp light leaking in the door. All except for her hair, which was as pretty as ever. She clicked on the light and shut the door behind him. He looked around and said, "Oh, Jesus Christ." It was the first time I"d ever heard a grown man say it like a prayer. Then he sat down at our table and started signing to my mom.
He wasn"t an aid man, or a drug man, but a real high-up government man. The second surprise was that my mom signed back to him. I suddenly remembered I hadn"t seen the signing books around in a while. Probably in her room. Ingratiating behavior. I wondered what she"d been signing to Lisa while I was away at school each day. Then I forgot that and paid attention to what he was saying. He talked out loud as he signed, like it helped him keep his place or something.
"Lavender"s . . . people . . . are very angry . . . about his death. He was . . . important Skoag (the sign for Skoag was to put your fingers on your forehead and make your hand do push-ups, like a pulsing membrane). Not exile . . . but like a priest . . . or civil rights worker."
He went on about how important Lavender had been, how he had come in the hopes of reconciling the exiles and instead he started sharing their beliefs, and then went further than they did. It didn"t match what Lavender had told me, but I kept my mouth shut. The heart of it was that news of his death had finally reached his home planet, and a lot of Skoags were very upset. The way he said it, I didn"t know if the message had just taken that long to get there, or if the exiled Skoags had kept killing Lavender a secret. But I still kept my mouth shut. Anyway, the planet Skoags were going to send someone to look into it, and our government had agreed to cooperate fully. Including letting the Skoags talk to my mom and me. I felt like telling him it was up to us whether we met the Skoags. But I didn"t. He went on about how this was a real opportunity for humans to establish diplomatic relations with the Skoag planet, and it might be our first step toward deep s.p.a.ce, and the United States could lead the way, and all that s.h.i.t. Then he suggested the first thing we"d have to do was move.
That"s when I opened my mouth. "No," I said, firmly, and was surprised when my mom repeated it, "No," very clear.
He talked a lot about why we had to move. The Skoag amba.s.sador or whatever was coming, probably within two or three years. (I was surprised they didn"t know exactly when, but they didn"t.) And we had to be somewhere nice, so the United States wouldn"t be embarra.s.sed, and somewhere safe, so no terrorists would try to kidnap us or kill us, and somewhere more official, where advisers could tell us what to say to the Skoags.
He was still explaining at four in the morning, when Mom stood up, said, "NO" very emphatically, and then walked back to her bedroom and shut the door.
He stared at the door. Then he sighed and rumpled up his hair. "This is a big mistake," he said. And he shook his head. "A d.a.m.n big mistake that we"re all going to hate remembering. You"re going to blow it for all of us, kid, for the whole d.a.m.n human race. s.h.i.t. Well, I guess we work around it, then."
So he left.
For a while I lay awake, wondering if there really was danger, if our neighbors would turn on us or terrorists would bomb us. But then I decided that at least terrorists wouldn"t try to take Lisa away from me and put her in special school or a home while they treated Mom for being a gropie. That would happen for sure if they moved us, because there"d be no way to hide Mom"s addiction. That was why Mom said no, too. She was afraid of losing her Skoag slime source. As for me, I could never leave the only place I"d ever shared with Lavender. I stared at the spot where he"d died. The chalk marks were years gone, but I could still see them.
The government man was trickier than I thought. A month later our neighborhood was picked for Facelift Funding. All owners were given eighteen months to upgrade or lose the funding. So our walls got spraysulated and paneled, and they foamed the floor and put in carpet-heat and a tiny insta-hot unit under the sink. Then the old furnace room became part of our apartment, as a second bedroom.
The whole neighborhood changed. They jackhammered up squares of sidewalk and put in skinny little trees, and all the buildings got new siding. They hauled away the trash heap from behind the building, including our old linoleum. They put in a tiny fenced play yard, with organo-turf and big plastic climbing toys. They put flower boxes around the streetlamps. I hated it. They were trying to cover us up, trying to say, these aren"t poor people living in their own trash, these are nice folks like in the readers at school. The daddies and mommies have jobs, they go to church, and their kids drink white milk and eat brown bread. I hated it, but Lisa loved it. She kept picking the flowers and bringing them to Mom. Mom always put them in a vase, just like Lavender"s flowers. Sometimes I wanted to smash it.
I came home from school one day, and a moving van was just pulling away. Scared the h.e.l.l out of me. Had Mom decided to move after all? Had she kidnapped Lisa and left?
But she was there. "Govamin," she said disgustedly, and stood there like there was no place to sit.
All our old stuff was gone. Even the cupboards and fridge were different, and the cooker was huge, with hot beverage taps on the side. My couch was gone, the friendly smell of mice gone with it. The new one matched the fat chair beside it. The stereo was about as big as a loaf of bread, but it was a real wall shaker. There was a vid-box, a keyboard console, and a minidish. Guess the government wanted us to look good.
The new bedroom had twin beds with a dorky little screen between them, like I hadn"t been bathing Lisa since she was born. Lisa was bouncing on her bed already, looking like a kid in a catalog. I caught her as she jumped, and for just a second, as she came down in my arms, she looked just like Mom. Exactly. Same hair, same eyes, and I knew it was true, she was Mom"s clone and would look just like her when she grew up. Except that her hands and cheek would never be scarred. I set her down and she ran to Mom and hugged her around the knees. And we stood there and looked around, like there was no place left for us.
So they thought they changed us, so we wouldn"t shame the United States when the Skoag came. But they didn"t change the fat Skoag"s secret Wednesday visits, or Mom"s blank humming. The chalk lines were still there, and I could see them right through the carpet. And our neighbors still didn"t talk to us.
We waited. One year. Two years. More Skoags came but not the Skoag we waited for. Three years. Someone wrote a big article in the paper that the whole thing about a Skoag amba.s.sador coming had been a scam, a hoax. The fat Skoag told me the truth. He"d come. He"d talked to the ones that killed Lavender. And he"d agreed it had been necessary. He hadn"t wanted to talk to humans at all.
The carpeting got worn spots, and Lisa scribbled on the new paneling and Mom couldn"t get it off. Four years. Graffiti on the buildings, and beer bottles in the flower beds. We forgot about the government and the government forgot about us.
Lisa was seven, nearly eight. We were walking home after a day at Gasworks Park. I was worrying because a letter had come from the school. Someone had turned us in, had reported that a child in our home was being deprived of an equal education. If Lisa didn"t go to school, they"d cancel the aid checks. We couldn"t get by without the aid checks. I didn"t know what the h.e.l.l to do. I was thinking about running away with her. I was fifteen, nearly old enough to get work somewhere.
A bunch of Skoags were jamming on the corner, same old thing. I kept walking. I never listened to Skoags anymore. I was a block past them before I realized Lisa wasn"t with me. I ran back, but it was too late.
All she was doing was listening. Eyes big, lips parted, listening like she always listened to music. The Skoags were playing some old Beatles thing. There were a few tourists, a few hecklers, the usual mix, and the Skoags were playing and Lisa was listening.
Then all of a sudden they stopped, their membranes all swelled out, and they all looked at her. Colors washed through their crests, bright colors, and they started making a sound, an incredible sound like Jesus coming in the sky on a white horse to save us all. It got louder and louder. Skoags started coming out of buildings, flipping down the sidewalks, and as soon as they came, they started making the sound, too, and colors started racing through their crests. They surrounded Lisa, pushing to get closer, all making the sound. It was a glorious Alleluia sound, and Lisa loved it. She glowed, and her eyes were huge. I shoved my way in there. I grabbed her hand and I dragged her out of there, past Skoags who reached for us with shining flippers. I s.n.a.t.c.hed her up and ran all the way home and locked the door behind us.
The next day our street was packed so full of Skoags that cars couldn"t pa.s.s. Silent Skoags, standing and swaying on their big flat flippers, but not making a sound. Staring at our building. Copters flew over, and the film was on television, but the news people had no idea what was going on, they just "urged inhabitants of the affected neighborhood to stay inside and remain calm while officials determine what to do."
It lasted for two days. The streets packed with Skoags, our door locked, and my heart hammering the whole time until I thought my head would blow up. Suspecting, almost knowing.
On the third day, I woke up to a sound like birds harmonizing with the rush of ocean waves and the laughter of little kids. The sound had been part of a very good dream I was having, so when I woke up and still heard it, I wasn"t really awake. Then I realized what had wakened me. A smaller set of sounds. A chair being pushed across the carpet to the door. The chain being undone. I jumped out of bed.
The street was empty, almost. There was only a gray government sedan, and the same government man who had come four years ago. And a big, big Skoag, with a tall purple crest. He was singing the harmonizing bird song, and Lisa was walking straight toward him. She was smiling and her hair was floating on the wind. Like a dream walker. Then the Skoag opened his mittened flippers to her, and she began to run.
I screamed her name, I know I did, but she didn"t seem to hear me. The Skoag picked her up, and I was still running down the street as they all got in the car. The government man gunned it and they were gone.
And that"s the end of the story. Almost.
Mom was standing in the doorway, crying. The tears went crooked where they met her scars and flowed around them.
"Go after her!" I screamed. "Get her back. They just took her."
"No." She said each word carefully, signing them for emphasis: "They didn"t take her. She wanted to go. She had to go. She shouldn"t have to come back, not just for us."
"You can"t know that!" I yelled. "How can you say that?"
She looked at me a long time. "Because I heard it," she signed slowly, silently. I watched her scarred fingers move, the wonder that flooded her face. "I heard it, and it called me. But it wasn"t for me, not the me that"s here. It was for the other me, the one you made. The one you made for them. The circle closer. The one who listens so well that she has no need to speak. The me done right. But this me heard it and knew how bad she wanted to go."
Then Mom went back in her room and closed her door.
Nothing happened after that. The fat Skoag never came back, and Mom never went through withdrawal. I guess the last song was enough to last her forever. I never went to school again, and the government people never came to ask about us. They never came to tell us anything either. There were no write-ups in the paper, no news stories about a little girl stolen by the Skoags. No one ever asked why Lisa never came to school. No one ever asked just how much one little girl is worth to the government. Or to a Skoag with a purple crest.
But the next month Boeing got a huge government contract that put half of Seattle back to work, and the papers were full of news about the breakthrough design that could give us the stars. So I didn"t need it spelled out. Do you?
The world gets the stars, the Skoags get Lisa, and I get nothing. Lisa"s gone, and with her every touch of Lavender. It was a hard thing he asked of me, but I did it. I looked after the Mom. The Skoags can go back home now. Every day, there are fewer of them on the streets. They always bow to my mom and me. They no longer sing, but all their crests ripple with color. Sometimes I wonder if Lavender even knew what he was asking.
Or maybe all he meant was that I should look out for Mom, and the rest of it was just an accident. I don"t know.
Mom and I still live here. Next month I"ll be eighteen. I"ll have to register with the aid office as an adult, and with the job office for training. Mom"s Career Mother checks will stop and she"ll have to get job training or lose all her aid. I"ll have to move out, because aid receivers aren"t allowed to let other adults share their homes. Mom will probably get a smaller place.
That"s too bad. Because just last night, as I was falling asleep on the couch, I heard a mouse, nibbling inside there.
It"s been a good home, really. I had good folks.
Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man.
This story was written in 1988 as a fortieth birthday present for my husband, Fred.
Since the early 1970s I"d had an agreement with my husband. He didn"t read my fiction. He didn"t read it in draft form or before I sent it out. He didn"t even read it after it had been published. It was a wall we"d put in place after we realized that we simply knew each other too well. I could shrug off criticism from any other reader, but not from him. He was simply too good at putting his finger unerringly on exactly my greatest doubt.
Writing fiction, my friend, is a game of sleight of hand that a writer plays with her- or himself. The writer takes key events, dazzling pains, gasping joys, and unutterable boredom and weaves them into a story that is always, inevitably, about the writer"s own life. The trick is to write it in such a way that the writer does not know he or she is merely holding up a very large and distorted mirror of the writer"s life. It is my opinion that the only way writers can serve up their own steaming entrails on a platter and not know they are offering their own vital essence to the world is by disguising it.
And I was never able to disguise it well enough from Fred. He would read a story, a story that wasn"t about me or us or any time or place we had ever lived, and then he"d say, "Oh, yeah, I remember that day. That was awful, wasn"t it?"
And suddenly I"d see the roots of my own tale. And be unable to even finish polishing the story, let alone put it out there for sale. There were two choices for me. I"d either have to give up being a writer or ask Fred not ever to read anything I wrote. I chose the second alternative, and to this day, he has kept his word. The sole exception is this story, "Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man." It was written for him, as a gift, and he read it. And had the great good sense to not point out exactly where and how it intersected with my reality.
I do think that every freelance writer reaches a point at which he or she says, "If I quit trying to write fiction and just spent those hours working for someone else for minimum wage, I"d come out dollars ahead." I know I certainly have, and more than once. In the speckled years of my writing career, I"ve served pizza, pulled beers, delivered the US mail, sold consumer electronics, managed an electronics store, and yes, worked as a salesperson in the ladies" clothing department of a Sears store. And at times like that, when a writer is not writing, sometimes someone else believing in you is what it takes to put the world back on track.
And thereby hangs a tale . . .
It was about 8:15 P.M. and I was standing near the register in a Sears in a substandard suburban mall the first time the fortyish man came in. There were forty-five more minutes to endure before the store would close and I could go home. The Muzak was playing, and a Ronald McDonald display was waving at me cheerily from the children"s department. I was thinking about how animals in traps chew their legs off. There was a time when I couldn"t understand that type of survival mechanism. Now I could. I was wishing for longer, sharper teeth when the fortyish man came in.
For the last hour or so, salespeople had outnumbered customers in the store. A dead night. I was the only salesperson in Ladies" Fashions and Lingerie, and I had spent the last two hours straightening dresses on hangers, zipping coats, putting T-shirts in order by size and color, clipping bras on hangers, and making sure all the jeans faced the same way on the racks. Now I was tidying up all the bags and papers under the register counter. Boredom, not dedication. Only boredom can drive someone to be that meticulous, especially for four dollars an hour. One part boredom to two parts despair.
So a customer, any kind of a customer, was a welcome distraction. Even a very ordinary fortyish man. He came straight up to my counter, threading his way through the racks without even a glance at the dresses or sweaters or jeans. He walked straight up to me and said, "I need a silk scarf."
Believe me, the last thing this man needed was a silk scarf. He was tall, at least six feet, and had reached that stage in his life where he buckled his belt under his belly. His dark hair was thinning, and the way he combed it did nothing to hide the fact. He wore fortyish-man clothing, and I won"t describe it, because if I did you might think there was something about the way he dressed that made me notice him. There wasn"t. He was ordinary in the most common sense of the word, and if it had been a busy night in the store, I"d never even have seen him. So ordinary he"d be invisible. The only remarkable thing about him was that he was a fortyish man in a Sears store on a night when we had stayed open longer than our customers had stayed awake. And that he"d said he needed a silk scarf. Men like him never buy silk scarves, not for any reason.
But he"d said he needed a silk scarf. And that was a double miracle of sorts, the customer knowing what he wanted, and I actually having it. So I put on my sales smile and asked, "Did you have any particular color in mind, sir?"
"Anything," he said, an edge of impatience in his voice. "As long as it"s silk."
The scarf rack was right by the register, arranged with compulsive tidiness by me earlier in the shift. Long scarves on the bottom rack, short scarves on the top rack, silk to the left, acrylics to the right, solid colors together in a rainbow spectrum on that row, patterns rioting on that hook, all edges gracefully fluted. Scarves were impulse sales, second sales, "wouldn"t you like a lovely blue scarf to go with that sweater, miss?" sales. No one marched into a Sears store at 8:15 at night and demanded a silk scarf. People who needed silk scarves at 8:15 at night went to boutiques for them, little shops that smelled like perfumes or spices and had no Hamburglars lurking in the aisles. But this fortyish man wouldn"t know that.