The saskiad, p.7
The Saskiad, page 7
Jane comes to look. She figured out a while ago that Bill was Lauren's boyfriend. "Wow, they're really going at it." Saskia turns away. "Where's Jo?"
"She doesn't smoke hemp. She probably realizes she can't afford the brain damage." Jane is looking intently through the door. "Let's go back upstairs," Saskia says.
"In a sec."
Saskia is certainly not going to clean up the mess. Lauren and Bill will leave it, too, and the food will dry and stick to the plates and they'll have a hard time cleaning it tomorrow. Tough noogies. "They're heading up," Jane says, coming away from the door. She swivels her hips and smiles, twitching her eyebrows.
"Yeah, whatever."
"God, Lauren is so beautiful. She could do better than Bill."
"No kidding."
"So are we going upstairs too?"
"I just remembered I have to check something in the barn. Let's do that first." Bill huffs and puffs so loud you can hear him all the way up on the top floor, it's disgusting.
When they do go up a while later, all is safely quiet. Lauren is reading a book in bed. "Good night, Lauren!"
"Good night, girls. Sweet dreams."
Up in Saskia's room, Jane's eyes are sparkling. "So what happened to Bill?"
"He must be back in his trailer." Post-puff.
"She boots him? After they do it?"
"Lauren never lets him sleep up here, if that's what you mean."
"Wow!"
"Well would you? He probably twitches all night." Think of that ultra-trimmed beard poking into you, those disgusting long fingernails. On second thought, Saskia doesn't want to think about it.
"Lauren hasn't ever let any of her boyfriends sleep with her. She says she can't sleep with someone else in her bed." At least Kevin argued with her. Boy, the fights they had! Bluffaroo just takes whatever morsels are thrown to him.
"What an Amazon!"
"She is not!"
"No, I think it's great!" Jane closes the door. "Now J want to get stoned." She goes to her jean jacket where it's hanging among the Tartar spears and takes out a pouch.
"You mean now?" Saskia squeaks. "Here?"
"I'm in the mood in the worst way."
"I. . ." What can she say? "I've never done it before."
"I figured that. It's easy." Jane dangles the pouch like a mouse held by its tail. "This is a nickel bag."
"I know that."
"All right, then."
Saskia looks on in dread as Jane labors over her desk, shaking out shavings, pinching the paper into a groove and licking the edge with her felt-tipped tongue. She holds up a sliver almost as neat as the ones Bill makes, which are so uniformly neat they look like something you would buy in a Family Pak. "I don't want to try it," Saskia blurts out. She backpedals: "I mean . .."
"Don't worry," Jane says, putting a match to it and puffing it into life. "There's nothing to it." She holds it out to Saskia. Saskia just stares at it. Jane has insisted it's not moronizing, you just have to be inside it to see that. "Look, how do you know you don't want to unless you try?"
Words of reason. Jane is so good to her, so patient. She puts up with all of Saskia's barnish timidities, her slowpoking. How can Saskia disappoint her? "It makes you giggle," Saskia says unhappily.
"If you don't like it, just don't do it again. It's not like you don't have a choice afterward." Well, that's true. Saskia prides herself on her willpower. "Come on, girl," Jane says gently. She puffs again to make sure it is still lit and places it in Saskia's hand.
Saskia's heart aches at the thought of Jane's goodness. Surely she would do anything to please Jane. Suddenly she wants to be enfolded in the long arms of this older, wiser girl. Jane would kiss the top of her head and smooth down her wispy hair. What Saskia fears most is becoming a different person, the way Odysseus' men changed when they ate the honey-sweet lotus and forgot their way home; the way Lauren changes from the capable woman who keeps Bluffaroo in his place to the silly thing that nuzzles him and lets him scuttle into her bed. To change! That is not the way to be right-acting, to be trustworthy and constant such as one would never expect in a young person. You change, and you find you don't fit your space anymore. Where would you be then but falling, forgotten?
One must have the constancy of things. When she was little, Saskia had a blue-jean book bag with an olive canvas strap. She took it with her into sunny Ithaca and filled it with books from the great library. It was a good book bag, capacious and sturdy. After a while it got a rip in the bottom and Saskia put it away, intending to mend it before she used it again, so the rip wouldn't get bigger. But somehow — she was so young and thoughtless! — somehow she forgot about it. The book bag just went completely out of her head. For a couple of years she brought books home in a knapsack. And then one day, for no better reason than when she forgot, she remembered. It was such an old memory by then. Was it a true one? She remembered where she had put the book bag, but the place was in her own room. Surely it could not have lain there all that time, unnoticed. But she moved aside this and that, and there it was, exactly as she had left it, folded up, with the rip in the bottom. It had waited there patiently all that time for Saskia to come and fix it. Saskia had betrayed it, and yet it had waited for her. It didn't even blame her. It was ready to be her book bag again, capacious and sturdy as ever. Holding it in her arms, she cried.
Funny. She is crying now, too. "I can't," she sobs miserably, holding the stupid thing in her lap. "I just can't!"
Jane is silent. Saskia doesn't dare look up at her. She can picture the disappointment and disgust in her eyes. God, she knew she would blow it, she just knew it.
"It's all right," Jane is saying. "Look!" She is crumbling the joint in her hand. The curls of hemp shake out between her fingers. "I won't smoke either. I'll go on the wagon."
"Don't do that—"
"No, I've been thinking about it anyway. I've been smoking too much." Wiping her eyes, Saskia looks around for a tissue. "I've been terrible," Jane laughs.
And Saskia laughs with her, flooded with relief. "Where are the darn tissues?"
"Here."
Saskia honks, and laughs again. She is beginning to feel that cool calm you feel after you have been a baby and made a complete fool out of yourself. When you can't sink any lower.
"I'll be a reformed drug addict," Jane says. "How about that?"
Actually, that sounds kind of neat. A reformed drug addict! Dark circles under your eyes, the pain of the world in them. To have been there and back.
"Are you OK?" Jane asks. There is no wavering in her face, no doubt. She could quit anytime she wanted to. And she would quit for Saskia's sake. Won't Saskia walk that road for Jane? How else to share what she knows? Then they could quit together. They could suffer and be strong together. They could write haiku about it.
Deep down, Saskia believes she can overcome anything. The barns' ridicule at school doesn't hurt her because she wills it not to hurt. She could smoke a pack of cigarettes every day for a year and then quit, cold turkey. How can she prove she is superior to this hemp business, this stuff that Bill and even Lauren are weak enough to need, if she doesn't try it and then spurn it? The poor joint lies broken in Jane's hand. "I want to try it after all," Saskia says humbly.
"All right!" Jane sweeps together the crumbs and rolls another. "OK, first you take a deep drag." She lights it and sucks on it as if she were inhaling all the air in the room. She holds herself stiffly, chest out. "Thn hid t n." Wisps of smoke curl dragon-like from her flared nostrils as she hands the joint to Saskia. "Tzi-zi." Saskia turns it in her hands. A little stick of pencil shavings. Pathetic really, once you look at it. She feels the strength in her, the imperviousness. She inhales.
Far away, through the hacking and the pain, Jane is patting her on the back. If she could just get her lungs out onto the floor, she could douse them with water. "You've got virgin lungs, girl." Not anymore! On Saskia's second try the cough erupts again, but less painfully, and on the third she manages to hold her breath for a few seconds. The stuff scrapes around in there, sanding down edges. "There you go! Not so bad, is it?"
"Hm" is all Saskia can say, wide-eyed, holding it in. It tastes like a vacuum cleaner bag. She can see sparks whirling like stars in her deflowered chest, leaving cancerous black holes as they bury themselves in the defenseless membranes. But she feels nothing else. She feels none of the slow tide of warmth, the soothing nonchalance that Jane has described. Willpower. As in her controlled dreaming, she simply says to herself, "I am here. I am Saskia." Thus does she hold on to herself.
The joint goes back and forth, and she continues to feel nothing. This is immensely reassuring. "Don't worry," Jane says. "Sometimes you don't until the second or third time. It varies. I'm pretty fucked up, anyway. This is superbo stuff. But it's expensive! Where do Bill and Lauren get theirs?"
"Bluffaroo grows his own." Down in the hold, in a windowless room, he has trays, banks of lights, timers. His hemp is as doodah as his croutons. It, too, is held up and explicated, its superiority characterized in excruciating detail. "There's some trick about getting male and female plants together and then frustrating the females."
"That makes the oils build up. Probably like that congested feeling you get when you're interrupted."
"Hm?"
"You know, doing the dirty deed."
"Oh, yeah."
"Do you think he'd sell to us?"
"I can't see Bluffaroo being that helpful."
"Maybe we could just take some." Jane's color is high, her espresso eyes glitter, espressivo. Her pointy pink tongue is much in evidence as she talks enthusiastically. She is more beautiful than ever. Saskia wonders why she never before noticed just precisely how beautiful
Jane is.
Time for bed. Saskia turns to say something to Jane, but Jane is naked, just like that, rummaging in her overnight bag for her nightgown. Saskia looks away. She has to go to the bathroom to change into her own gown. She stands for a moment at Mim's door to listen. Once when Mim walked in her sleep, she actually went downstairs. What a spooky sound that was, the creak of the old stairs in the blackness! It took all of Saskia's courage to get out of bed and follow. "Mim, what are you doing?" But she kept walking without answering. In the darkness of the common room the bat-wing begonia was terrifying, a crouched form ready to flap those leathery wings and lumber aloft, moaning for blood. Mim went right out the front door and down the porch steps. She stopped in the gravel turnaround. She just stood there, with her arms at her sides, staring at nothing, a ghost in the moonlight. "Mim, what are you doing out of bed?" Saskia asked, hugging herself.
"Out of bed?" Mim's eyes pointed straight ahead. "What are you doing down here?" "Down here?"
Saskia took her arm. "Let's go back up." "Out of bed?"
It was one of Saskia's nightmares come to life, her horrible sneaking suspicion that everybody else in the world is really a robot, that one day when she eavesdrops, say, on Lauren and Bill, she will hear them conversing in dead, flat tones, not bothering to sound human now that the only human is not present. She turned Mim toward the house, nearly fainting with terror that the younger girl would say, "Out of bed? (click) Out of bed? (click) Out of bed?"
The girls smoke a second joint between the sheets. "Damme," Saskia growls in her Lieutenant's voice, regarding the joint judiciously. "Damme! A fine cigar, this! It draws well!" Jane laughs and laughs.
Saskia has never had anyone in her bed before. What could Lauren be bitching about? There is just enough room for the two girls to lie comfortably, touching flanks. She is so happy she would like to shout something around the world, or jump sky high. "Look at this." She turns off the light.
Jane giggles. "What are those?"
"My stars."
Jane snaps the light back on and stands on the bed to peer at the ceiling. "You can hardly see them when the light's on."
The ad in the mail-order catalogue showed the glow-in-the-dark stars sprinkled randomly across some stupid dreg's ceiling. Saskia stood on a ladder with a star chart crooked in one arm and marked each position with a pencil before sticking a single star. Her ceiling is astronomically accurate: a spring evening in the north temperate zone, circa 9 p.m.
Jane slips under the covers again and huddles against Saskia. "It's cold out there."
"There's some culture where they believe that every person's soul is tied by a thread to a star," Saskia says. "When a star falls, the thread is broken, and the person dies."
"You know the strangest things," Jane murmurs.
"Which star would you choose to be your soul-star?"
"Haven't the faintest. Which one is least likely to fall?"
"None of them really fall. Shooting stars are actually meteors."
They smoke the last of the joint. Long minutes of silence go by.
Then Jane says, "Listen!"
"What?"
"Don't you hear it?"
Saskia listens. "No." Then she does. Far away. A barely audible flutter. Slowly growing, coming nearer, a steady determined murmur. King, king, wong-king.
"Geese!" Jane whispers.
A haunting cry like a lonely spirit passing over the house in the night. King, king, king, wong-king. Somewhere up in the darkness a mysterious V points north, heading north. Who knows where? Reedy new-melted ponds set in snowfields, places they remember from last year, the goose at the point leading the way by celestial navigation. The calls are fading now as the geese leave Tylerian air space. King-king. They don't care about the girls, nor even know that they exist.
Jane sighs. "God, I love that sound! I used to imagine they were talking to me. 'Come on, girl! Fly!' In England I used to imagine I'd wandered all my life. I'd pretend I never had a fucking family. I would look at the houses I passed and think, 'How can people lock themselves up in those cages when the world is so unexplored? The same bed every night? How boring! What's over that hill? What's over the next?' God! The thought that I might just walk over the hill and then over the next one, and the next, never turning back. No one would know who I was. God. I loved the thought of that."
Saskia thinks of Thomas, walking inland with his oar on his shoulder. He walked until no one knew him or his people, until he was so much a stranger in a strange land that the man at the gate mistook his oar for a winnowing fan. What would Saskia's "oar" be? How would she know she had truly escaped? Would she carry a mixing bowl, until someone asked why her war drum was uncovered? Would she carry a school paper, until someone asked why she wrote such terribly long and dull haiku?
But Saskia does not want to leave rainy Tyler. She wants to wake up and find that Tyler has left her, that it has been supplanted by a world in which the houses are carved cedar boxes with open doors and Captain's rooms and uncluttered vistas, a world like the ones pictured on the herb tea boxes, all green fields and blue skies, a world called Ithacan Sunburst.
Saskia doesn't want to talk anymore. The silence between the girls drifts on, growing deeper. The stars have gone out. Normally Saskia would turn on her lamp again to recharge them, but she doesn't want Jane to guess that she is afraid of the dark. Her myriad failings rise up vividly before her: her ugliness, her weirdness, her timidity. What on earth does bold, beautiful Jane see in her?
11
Naked, she glides up the stairs. Damme, she will make it this time. She mounts the quarterdeck and opens the door of her cabin. She is wearing fine broadcloth breeches and a cutaway coat with two rows of brass buttons. She would so dearly love to have the brass gilded, but on a Lieutenant's share of prize money, it just is not possible. The Captain's scope and hat lie on her desk. A cup of his beloved coffee steams. The Captain's room is on the poop deck above. How to get up there? She surveys her cabin. There couldn't be a way up that she has never noticed before.
And yet there is. Memory pours in, filling her like a glass. Yes! There has always been a door between the bed and the bookshelf! How strange that she never opened it before! She opens it. Steep wooden stairs going up. She climbs. I'm coming! She rises into a small space with windows all around, a space soaked with golden light. She can see in all directions over the trees and rooftops of sunny Ithaca, miles north up the mighty blue bay. And the tall Captain is standing there, erect, his back to her, his beautiful, sensitive hands on the wheel. "Captain!" She snaps to attention.
But he does not turn around. His hands grip the wheel, urging it left and right. "Please forgive me, sir. I . . ." What excuse can she proffer? There is no excuse. She leans forward to see his face: gaunt, black with anger. Still not looking at her, he opens his mouth to say something, but his face curdles into a scowl and he stops himself.
She admires this in him, this iron British reserve. She herself is so blabby, always putting her foot in her mouth, always bragging embarrassingly. You can read Saskia like a book. But the Captain brutally suppresses his emotions, and there is something wonderful about the tortured look that spreads over his face as he says nothing, har-rumphs, and turns away. She hangs her head. "I betrayed you. I'm sorry."
He pulls the wheel savagely, with all his strength, and the ship lurches. Loose from its foundations, it lumbers forward with an octaves-deep sound of groaning and grinding. It rolls over one Ithacan house, and another, leaving splinters in its wake. With a final huge and wretched sigh, it tips over the embankment and slides into the water.
The Captain turns from the window. "I... I... ," she stutters, on her knees, barefoot, penitent. She awaits the well-deserved stroke. But his dark scowl crumbles. His eyes disappear into squints, his chin trembles. He begins to weep. He does not turn away, he simply stands there with his arms at his sides, weeping piteously. She takes him in her arms and fetches tissues out of her pocket to wipe his slobbery chin. She keeps repeating how sorry she is, yet she knows she will never make up for her betrayal. The ship rocks gently on the water.
