"You may," Alexandra said, gazing down to place a yellow-headed thumbtack symmetrical with another, as if this art were abstract. Though the neck and cheeks had been pierced, no one had dared thrust a pin into the eyes, which gazed expressionless or full of mournful spirit, depending on how the shadows fell.
"Oh no, you don't shove it off on me," Jane Smart said. "It should be all of us, we should all three put a finger on it."
Left hands intertwining like a nest of snakes, they pushed the needle through. The wax resisted, as if a lump of thicker substance were at its center. "Die," said one red mouth, and another, "Take that!" before giggling overtook them. The needle eased through. Alexandra's index finger showed a blue mark about to bleed. "Should have worn a thimble," she said.
"Lexa, now what?" Sukie asked. She was panting, slightly.
A little hiss arose from Jane as she contemplated their strange achievement.
"We must seal the malignancy in," Alexandra said. "Jane, do you have Reynolds Wrap?"
The other two giggled again. They were scared, Alexandra realized. Why? Nature kills constandy, and we call her beautiful. Alexandra felt drugged, immobilized, huge like a queen ant or bee; the things of the world were pouring through her and reemerging tinged with her spirit, her will.
Jane fetched too large a sheet of aluminum foil, torn off raggedly in panic. It crackled and shivered in the speed of her walk. Children's footsteps were pounding down the hall. "Each spit," Alexandra quickly commanded, having bedded Jenny upon the trembling sheet. "Spit so the seed of death will grow," she insisted, and led the way.
Jane spitting was like a cat sneezing; Sukie hawked a bit like a man. Alexandra folded the foil, bright side in, around and around the charm, softly so as not to dislodge the pins or stab herself. The result looked like a potato wrapped to be baked.
Two of Jane's children, an obese boy and a gaunt little girl with a dirty face, crowded around curiously. "What's that?" the girl demanded to know. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of evil. Both her upper and lower teeth were trussed in a glittering fretwork of braces. She had been eating something sweet and greenish.
Jane told her, "A project of Mrs. Spofford's that she's been showing us. It's very delicate and I know she doesn't want to undo it again so please don't ask her."
"I'm starving," the boy said. "And we don't want hamburgers from Nemo's again, we want a home-cooked meal like other kids get."
The girl was studying Jane closely. In embryo she had Jane's hatchet profile. "Mother, are you drunk?"
Jane slapped the child with a magical quickness, as if the two of them, mother and daughter, were parts of a single wooden toy that performed this action over and over. Sukie and Alexandra, whose own starved children were howling out there in the dark, took this signal to leave. They paused on the brick walk outside the house, from whose wide lit windows spilled the spiralling tumult of a family quarrel. Alexandra asked Sukie, "Want custody of this?"
The foil-wrapped weight in her hand felt warm.
Sukie's lean lovely nimble hand already rested on the door handle of her Corvair. "I would, sweetie, but I have these rats or mice or whatever they are that nibbled at the other. Don't they adore candle wax?"
Back at her own house, which was more sheltered from the noise of traffic on Orchard Road now that her hedge of lilacs was leafing in, Alexandra put the thing, wanting to forget it, on a high shelf in the kitchen, along with some flawed bubbles she hadn't had the heart to throw away and the sealed jar holding the polychrome dust that had once been dear old well-intentioned Ozzie.
"He goes everywhere with her," Sukie said to Jane over the phone. "The Historical Society, the conservation hearings. They make themselves ridiculous, trying to be so respectable. He's even joined the Unitarian choir."
"Darryl? But he has utterly no voice," Jane said sharply.
"Well, he has a little something, a kind of a baritone. He sounds just like an organ pipe." "Who told you all this?"
"Rose Hallybread. They've joined at Brenda's too. Darryl apparently had the Hallybreads over to dinner and Arthur wound up telling him he wasn't as crazy as he had first thought. This was around two in the morning, they had all spent hours in the lab, boring
Rose silly. As far as I could understand, Darryl's new idea is to breed a certain kind of microbe in some huge body of water like Great Salt Lake—the saltier the better, evidently—and this little bug just by breeding will turn the entire lake into a huge battery somehow. They'd put a fence around it, of course."
"Of course, my dear. Safety first."
A pause, while Sukie tried to puzzle through if this was meant sarcastically and, if so, why. She was just giving the news. Now that they no longer met at Darryl's they saw each other less frequently. They had not officially abandoned their Thursdays, but in the month since they had put the spell on Jenny one of the three had always had an excuse not to come. "So how are you?" Sukie asked.
"Keeping busy," Jane said.
"I keep running into Bob Osgood downtown."
Jane didn't bite. "Actually," she said, "I'm unhappy. I was standing in the back yard and this black wave came over me and I realized it had something to do with summer, everything green and all the flowers breaking out, and it hit me what I hate about summer: the children will be home all day."
"Aren't you wicked?" Sukie asked. "I rather enjoy mine, now that they're old enough to talk adult talk. Watching television all the time they're much better informed on world affairs than I ever was; they want to move to France. They say our name is French and they think France is a civilized country that never fights wars and where nobody kills anybody."
"Tell them about Gilles de Rais," Jane said.
"I never thought of him; I did say, though, that it was the French made the mess in Vietnam in the first place and that we were trying to clean it up. They wouldn't buy that. They said we were trying to create more markets for Coca-Cola."
There was another pause. "Well," Jane said. "Have you seen her?" "Who?"
"Her. Jeanne d'Arc. Madame Curie. How does she look?"
"Jane, you're amazing. How did you know? That I saw her downtown."
"Sweetie, it's obvious from your voice. And why else would you be calling me? How was the little pet?"
"Very pleasant, actually. It was rather embarrassing. She said she and Darryl have been missing us so much and wish we'd just drop around some time informally, they don't like to think they have to extend a formal invitation, which they will do soon, she promised; it's just they've been terribly busy lately, what with some very hopeful developments in the lab and some legal affairs that keep taking Darryl to New York. Then she went on about how much she loves New York, compared with Chicago, which is windy and tough and where she never felt safe, even right in the hospital. Whereas New York is just a set of cozy little villages, all heaped one on top of the other. Etcetera, et cetera."
"I'll never set foot in that house again," Jane Smart vehemently, needlessly vowed.
"She really did seem unaware," Sukie said, "that we might be offended by her stealing Darryl right out from under our noses that way."
"Once you've established in your own mind that you're innocent," Jane said, "you can get away with anything. How did she look?"
Now the pause was on Sukie's side. In the old days their conversations had bubbled along, their sentences braiding, flowing one on top of the other, each anticipating what the other was going to say and delighting in it nonetheless, as confirmation of a pooled identity.
"Not great," Sukie pronounced at last. "Her skin seemed ... transparent, somehow."
"She was always pale," Jane said.
"But this wasn't just pale. Anyway, baby, it's May. Everybody should have a little color by now. We went down to Moonstone last Sunday and just soaked in the dunes. My nose looks like a strawberry; Toby kids me about it."