Of course none of us were girls anymore. We weren’t really old yet, but we were having trouble from time to time remembering things like what we’d had for dinner the night before. Most of us had married, some more than once. Some of us had children, one of us had a grandchild.
It’s not easy to have a good marriage, Janice said — she seemed to be addressing herself. Then she sighed and honked her horn at something no one else could see. Had any of us heard about the worm addicted to grape leaves? she asked, letting up on the accelerator and giving another little honk of the horn. Of course we hadn’t, as Janice well knew — no one had heard of it. There was a worm addicted to grape leaves, she continued, and suddenly it woke up. Call it a miracle, whatever, something woke it up and it wasn’t a worm anymore. It was the whole vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, an ever-expanding joy that didn’t need to devour anything.
She sped up, driving the van down the third of the three hills, past the school and the water tower and across the railroad bridge.
I can’t remember the last time I was back here, someone said. She’d married a foreigner and had developed a bit of an accent.
Worms? said someone else. Is she talking about worms now?
I would kill for a drink, said the chemist.
Amazingly, there was one parking spot left at the end of the street up near the Avenue; Janice began the complicated job of maneuvering the van into it.
We used to sit there, the curly-haired girl said, on those very steps. Very eyes, she recalled Janice saying and someone asking, what are very eyes? It might have been the dead woman but she couldn’t be sure. That’s where I traded everything away, the girl thought. Night had been falling. The stars had just been coming out though really they’d been there all along. They were there now behind the bright blue banner that was the sky.
The dead woman’s parents had money, Janice said; I wonder what became of it? They wanted lots of children, more or less in the spirit of plantation owners wanting slaves, but they only got the one. After grade school they sent her off to a boarding school where she wore a blue uniform and everyone studied the classics, the kind of place you’d go if you wanted to learn Greek so you could read things like those poems you were always so keen on. She caught the curly-haired girl’s eye in the rearview mirror. But the poor thing was never much of a student, was she? I heard she played cover point on the JV lacrosse team and she enjoyed history, but only because she had a crush on the teacher.
In grade school she could do the times tables faster than anyone, said the chemist.
That’s just memorizing, said Janice. In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. No big deal. Anyone can memorize. You, me. Chimps, even. What I’m saying is she didn’t have brains.
She’s dead, said the smallest of the little sisters who’d grown into a large woman with a flourishing business of her own. She was our friend. Why can’t someone say something nice about her?
We’d spent a lot of time together a long time ago but Janice was right. Like Pangaea, when the parts came back together, the coastline of Asia didn’t dovetail with South America, just as you couldn’t make a pair anyone would want to trade for out of Pinkie and a horse. Some continents moved faster and farther than others. The one who’d married a foreigner became a famous opera singer.
After boarding school she went to college, Janice continued. She went to a good school, but that was because her parents had money. The kind of school where they dance around a maypole but also volunteer at soup kitchens. That kind of place. She was still a whiz at memorizing facts; everyone’s always been hot for facts. Dates, names, you know what I mean. She majored in history. She knew loads of things. She knew the War of the Roses didn’t have anything to do with roses. She knew about all the wars. Don’t major in history if you don’t want to hear about wars. She knew about General Wolfe scaling the Heights of Abraham. She knew about the atom bomb. She knew secret restricted data about brown-skinned people being used as guinea pigs after the Castle Bravo accident. She even knew about the Know-Nothings.
I hate this, the opera singer said. This is boring. She was standing toward the back of the group, trying to speak sotto voce, but Janice overheard her.
History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It’s not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It’s what comes before history that isn’t boring. She hummed a little, hoyotoho, hoyotoho. Prophecy, she said. Prophecy isn’t boring.
Getting old had agreed with Janice, bringing her bones closer to the surface. For the funeral she’d donned a plain black dress and was wearing her hair in a twist — she looked a little like a sibyl.
We should go inside, said the chemist. It’ll seem weird if we stay out here any longer.
Everyone began moving up the steps, closer to the front door. Summer was over but the trees had yet to let go of their leaves. The air was still warm but it had a cool blade in it, sharpening the shadows of the sycamores. The women could hear the sound of music coming through the open windows of the deceased’s house — someone was playing the piano. They could also hear the sound of many people speaking all at once but keeping their voices down, in deference to the dead.
She always wanted to be a good girl, Janice reminded us, turning from where she stood at the door, her hand on the knob.
I thought you said she was the one who stole things, someone said.
Sure, Janice said. She did. But nothing really valuable.
That locket was a family heirloom, said someone else.
Be that as it may, Janice replied. She didn’t finish the thought.
What was important was that the deceased was no different from the rest of us. She went to school and she said her prayers and eventually all the bad things she never allowed herself to do blended together inside her into a feeling that wouldn’t come to the surface like the bubble in the carpenter’s level that was still down there in what used to be her father’s cellar workshop.
If you don’t believe me, go look, Janice said. That’s what happens to girls when they have the wish to be good, so good they almost can’t be seen.
I heard she was pretty tall when she died, said the farmer. I heard they had to cut her feet off to fit her in the coffin.
Oh for heaven’s sake, said the chemist.
That’s just a fairy tale, said someone else.
The opera singer began to sing: Light she was and like a fairy and her shoes were number nine. For a moment her voice took us with it as it flew skyward, before dropping us back down to the ground.
Inside the house was extremely hot, even with the changing season and the windows open. Whoever was playing the piano was proficient but musically oblivious, speeding through a series of maudlin tunes as if there were no tomorrow.
That trip to Italy was the high point of her life, a family member was saying, pointing to a large framed print of Michelangelo’s David hanging over the piano.
I had no idea, said the opera singer. Like the rest of us, she was visibly brighter now that she had a glass of whiskey in her hand. I thought the only place she went was to the shore, like everyone else around here.
It was a tour, Janice said. Milan to Florence to Venice to Rome. She met a man in Florence and took him back to her hotel room with her. He wasn’t as handsome as David but he was Italian and, more important, he had all the working parts. During the night bats got into the room through the shutters and flew around and around up near the ceiling. The hotel had very high ceilings — at first she and the man tried standing on the bed and using pillowcases to chase the bats out the windows, but after a while they gave up. In the morning the bats had curled themselves into little balls in the agapanthus leaves of the ceiling fixture and the man was gone.