Duplex (9 page)

Y
OU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, RIGHT? JANICE asked. She stood there balanced on one leg in what had come to be called the Mary Pose, after the famous Mary who had lived in number 47.

But no one knew; girls never know what happens next. Days went by, weeks, years even. Everything in life stood poised like Mary on the verge of what was possible. For example Janice had a boyfriend—no one could have predicted this. He went to Our Mother of Consolation and used to be one of the boys on bikes who appeared on the street to throw eggs at anyone who didn’t get out of the way. A little girl jumping rope opened her mouth to scream and an egg went in and after a while a chick hatched in her stomach.

No one was interested in trading cards anymore. All the good trades had been made, the black horse and the white horse at last together in a pack in the bottom of the cigar box in the back of Janice’s closet. At some point her mother decided to have a new closet system put in. She didn’t admit it to herself, but her mother was preparing for the day when Janice would get married and leave home for good and she could take over the closet as her own. The cigar box was hidden under a pair of toe shoes and a tutu and a black velvet riding helmet and a ton of foil candy wrappers from back when Janice used to lie stomach-down in the closet, producing one foil-wrapped chocolate egg after another from somewhere underneath her like an exotic type of frog. Janice’s mother put everything except the candy wrappers in a carton along with her fox stole and several
Reader’s Digest
condensed books and took the carton to church for the Christmas bazaar.

The obsession with trading cards had been replaced with a fad for writing novels about horses. The novels were composed in the same marbleized notebooks that had once been fashionable for schoolwork. The system was: one novel per notebook. Fathers still were forced to buy cigars they would never smoke, but now it was so their daughters could enter a contest sponsored by the cigar company and win a racehorse. “Lightning Bolt,” “Black Dancer,” “Speed Demon,” “Nightmare”—any one of these names could be a winner, plus they also made excellent titles for the novels. “White Cloud.”

“In a dank cave in the mountains of the west a baby foal named White Cloud was born. It arose slowly on its dainty legs, its fetlocks wobbling with the superhuman effort, its mother, the dapple-gray mare who had just found sanctuary there from the wrath of the thunderstorm, was nickering softly to it.”

Horses aren’t born in caves, someone pointed out. Also, a foal
is
a baby.

It was like a club: Saturday afternoon they all met with their notebooks in the park at the foot of the street and took turns reading their novels aloud. The park had once been a vacant lot where people’s dogs defecated without anyone bothering to pick up after them, but over time the community association had brought about a great many improvements, including planting a flower garden more or less at the center of the triangle and moving the three benches so they faced in at the flowers rather than out at the traffic. An old-fashioned street lamp was added later and a koi pool with a plaque on it commemorating the famous baseball player who had lived on the street and had once been Mary’s true love. Superhuman doesn’t apply to horses, Janice said.

Something in her tone made the author of “White Cloud” bristle. This was a curly-haired girl everyone knew wanted to be a writer when she grew up. I know that, the girl said.

That also happens to be a run-on sentence, Janice added.

She wasn’t a member of the club but often wandered through on her way to or from meeting her boyfriend. This was where she said she was headed or had been—no one knew for sure, only that she dressed the part of girlfriend with her camel-hair coat and tartan tam and brown leather pocketbook with its clasp shaped like a horseshoe. As Janice had gotten older she hadn’t gotten prettier. Her face was round like risen dough someone had stuck fingers in to make eyes. Still, she wore coins in her loafers, which meant she was going steady.

If she wore them in her eyes it would mean she was dead, the curly-haired girl whispered, not loud enough for Janice to hear.

There were no longer any flowers blooming in the garden, and sometimes overnight a sheet of ice formed above the two gigantic vermilion fish in the koi pool. The fish seemed to hang suspended without moving a muscle—some of the little girls, the ones who weren’t really club members but whose older sisters were—found the fish frightening. The only way you could tell they were alive was how every now and then one or the other of them would release a long dark string of excrement into the pool. The string would drift for a while and then break apart, making a horrible brown cloud.

I used to take riding lessons, Janice said. I know a lot about horses. I had a natural seat, Miss Haines told me.

She would rise and fall at the triple bar, the water-jump, the gate, the imitation wall, her hands buried in the flying mane firm on the stout muscles of her horse’s neck. He was a natural jumper, Janice said. She did not need to dictate to him. They cleared the wall together, wildly, ludicrously high, with savage effort and glory, and twice the power and the force that was needed.

Those aren’t her words, whispered the curly-haired girl. That’s
National Velvet.

Almost everyone knew that at Miss Haines’s riding stable Janice had been put on the oldest and slowest horse, a tall white gelding with a tail so thin you could see the bone through the hair. As Janice posted around and around the ring, holding the reins stiffly to either side like a dowser, Miss Haines stood at the rail, shouting directions. Janice was a terrible rider; she was afraid of horses, of all animals really.

You think you’re so smart, Janice said. She pointed at the sky and a few girls looked in the direction of her finger.

What was that? someone asked, but there wasn’t anything there aside from an airship and a long thin airship-shaped cloud.

If you have to ask, I’m not telling, Janice said. If you have to ask, it’s too late.

Too late for what? someone asked.

For a very important date, said someone else.

Go ahead, Janice said. Laugh why don’t you. She told everyone to thank their lucky stars she was there to laugh at. We were all too young to remember, but for a while after the Rain of Beads there weren’t any girls anywhere. On the street you could hear the sounds of boys playing baseball and sprinklers watering lawns and crickets rubbing their hind legs together and ice cubes clinking in highballs. So many of the sounds everyone expected to hear were there that it took a while before anyone realized the high-pitched sound of girls’ voices was missing. The boys’ voices hadn’t changed yet—that might have been part of the problem. But it was also true that no one wanted to admit what had happened.

The saddest thing, Janice said, was that everyone was very sad but no one could talk to anyone else about it. They were so sad they didn’t notice how some of the new girls were coming through wormholes instead of birth canals. It was hard to tell since often the wormholes were inside the mothers. Even the doctors couldn’t tell the difference.

That was the first generation of girls, Janice said, and I was in it.

Most of them were regular, but some of them were not one hundred percent girls; the only way to know for sure was when they played horse. You’ve all played horse, right?

We club members found it embarrassing to admit to ever having played such a babyish game, even though we had loved it when we did. Playing horse was like being caught in the act of “talking” for a doll or a pet—the only way it worked was if everyone was playing and there was no audience. To play horse you held your arms out with your elbows bent and your wrists cocked for the reins. On a real horse the reins would stay at the horse’s withers, but since the rest of the horse was you, this was the only way to clarify the separation between horse and rider, a distinction that was, in any case, fluid and boundary less and subject to infinite change. The best part of the game was executing different gaits; it was also tricky to accomplish this on two legs instead of four. Cantering was the best.

You know what a centaur is, don’t you? Janice asked. She handed round sticks of gum but not everyone took one—most young people’s gums bled easily from what was said to be vitamin C deficiency.

A ballplayer? asked one of the little sisters.

Not
that
kind of centaur, said someone else.

You mean a mythological creature, said the curly-haired girl, but since the
National Velvet
remark Janice had ceased to acknowledge her presence.

When the first generation of girls played horse they made the vacant lot into a racecourse. Back then the lot was a mess. No one mowed the grass and it was full of dog shit. Drunks often passed out on the benches, leaving behind paper bags with empty gin bottles inside. The girls had to watch where they put their hooves without losing sight of the other horses. They’d also been trained by their parents to keep an eye on the sky—everyone was still vigilant after the Rain of Beads. It was the job of a diabetic girl who’d lost one of her legs and hadn’t gotten her new one yet to shoot the pistol to start the race. She used a real starter pistol one of the other girls had found in her father’s workbench.

The gun went off and the girls began to gallop. They were just girls, most of them, in their shorts and T-shirts and silver shoon, their manes and tails French-braided and their tack polished to a high gloss with saddle soap.

From his vantage point atop the water tower the sorcerer was watching the race through his telescope, which he’d set up in the gap between two of the crenellation’s stone teeth. The sorcerer had never been interested in little girls; he was watching their necks, not their bottoms. It isn’t in an animal’s nature to look up, Janice said—I bet you didn’t know that. Animals don’t have the muscles and bones needed to move that way. By noticing which of the girls tilted their necks and which ones didn’t, the sorcerer could tell which girls running around the lot were girls and which were centaurs.

The Centaurs are ahead of the Rockets, said the same little sister, breathless with excitement at having something to add to the conversation.

Shhh, said her older sister but Janice wasn’t paying attention.

Everyone kept looking up because they thought danger came from the sky, she said, since that was where it came from the last time. This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past. It was like the past
was
the future. It never occurred to anyone that they ought to be looking at their own daughters.

Four of the girls weren’t real girls at all.

Would we recognize their names? someone asked. Did they live on the street?

I told you before, Janice said. No names. Why do you always want to hear names? Does that bush have a name? Does that tree? How about those fish?

It’s just that she hasn’t
thought
of any names, said the girl who wanted to be a writer.

The fish are called Mr. Poopie and Mrs. Poopie said the littlest sister.

Janice surveyed the group with enormous pity. If I told you the names it would make your brains explode, she said. She took a seat in the middle of a bench, using her wide hips to bump aside the girls who were sitting there. Then she opened her pocketbook and removed a small Bible that had to be unzipped to be read. Janice’s boyfriend was very religious; she went to Bible study class with him. He used to be planning to be a priest before he met Janice.

Some people think what you’re supposed to do in life is fill yourself up with loads of things like names, the more the better. But that’s not how it works. In here, she said, unzipping the book, it says there will be ten thousand times ten thousand angels and so on milling around the throne. In Bible days they thought ten thousand was an impossibly huge number. Like in the song, when we’ve been here ten thousand years bright shining as the sun. When you think about it though, ten thousand isn’t all that much. When you compare it with eternity, ten thousand’s nothing. And nothing’s exactly what you’re supposed to be filling yourself up with.

The girls’ horse parts were invisible to everyone except themselves. One was white and one was red and one was black and one didn’t have any color at all. I guess you could say the red one was roan. Because they looked like girls no one thought they weren’t. Eventually it was time for dinner and everyone went home—the centaurs lived in numbers 22 and 23 and 35 and 44. Many families were having spaghetti and meatballs as a special treat, it being Saturday. Aside from the family of atheists in number 22, they all said grace first. Bless oh Lord this food to our use and us to thy service.

And make us ever mindful of the needs of others, someone finished, but Janice was too involved now to hear anything but herself.

What each family saw was nothing like what the four centaurs saw. Three of these families saw a girl sitting with her head bowed over her plate of spaghetti, saying grace. These girls were especially attractive physical specimens. The one with white horse parts looked Scandinavian like her parents, the one with roan parts, Irish. The black centaur’s father’s father had been an African king. The atheists’ daughter was albino but even so her parents watched adoringly as she arranged her paper napkin on her lap and began twirling strands of spaghetti around her fork. Her mother called her my little fragrant one, due to the sweet aroma of her skin. The dining rooms were all identical, the houses having been built at the same time by the same developer. An identical light fixture hung above each dining room table, a kind of chandelier with six “arms” and six round bulbs that were aimed at the ceiling instead of the table, creating an interesting pattern overhead but making it hard to see what you were eating.

Ours has a dimmer switch, someone said.

The dimmer switches got added later, said someone else.