Dangerous Women (57 page)

Pretty, now neither child nor mother, sat in the center of the circle, on a sort of throne made of a chair covered with a blanket, which in turn was spread with towels. Old, as faded as everything else we take from abandoned buildings, the towels had once been sun-yellow. Pretty’s legs were spread wide, the thighs smeared with the new blood she was so proud of. One by one, the unBegun girls laid flowers between Pretty’s legs.

“May you be blessed with children,” said Tiny, looking excited.

“May you be blessed with children.” Seela, jealousy on her thin little face.

“May you be … blessed with … children.” Kara could barely get the words out. Her face creased with anguish. Her fingers trembled.

Pretty looked at her in astonishment. “What be wrong with
you
?”

Bonnie pushed forward. “Be you sick, Kara? What be your symptoms?”

“I’m not sick! Leave me alone!”

“Come here, Kara,” I said in the tone that all of the girls, and most of the younger men, obeyed instantly. I had been in charge of these girls since the pack acquired them, of Kara since she was four. Kara came to me. She had always been complicated, sweet-natured and hardworking (unlike lazy Pretty), but too excitable. Death distressed her too much, happiness elated her too much, beauty transported her too much. I have seen her in tears over a sunset.

“Do not spoil Pretty’s ceremony,” I said to her in a low voice, and she subsided.

Afterward, however, while the two mothers took Pretty aside for the traditional sex instruction that was hardly ever needed and the unBegun girls played with Jaden, I led Kara off the stage, to the back of the theater. “Sit.”

“Yes, Nurse. What is this place?”

“It was a theater. Kara, what troubles you?”

She looked away, looked down, looked everywhere but at me until I took her chin in my hand and made her face me. Then she blurted, “I don’t want to!”

“Don’t want to what?”

“Any of it! Begin, have a ceremony, bed with Mike and all them. Have a baby—I don’t want to!”

“Many girls are frightened at first.” I remembered my own first bedding, with a pack leader much less gentle than I suspected Mike would be. So long ago. Yet I had come to like sex, and right up until a few years ago, I had sometimes gone with Buddy off-list, until he was killed by that wild dog.

“I be frightened, yes. But I also don’t want to!”

“Is there something you want to do instead?” I was afraid she would say “nurse.” I already had Bonnie, and anyway, even if she proved infertile, Kara would not make a Nurse. No amount of hard work would make up for her lack of stability and brains.

“No.”

“What, then?” For girls there was only mother, nurse, or infertile bedmate, and the last became camp drudges with little respect, when packs kept infertile women at all. Our last such, Daisy, had run away. I didn’t like to imagine what had happened to her. Kara knew all this.

“I don’t know!” It was a wail of pure anguish. I had no time for this: a self-indulgent girl with no aim, merely obstruction of what was necessary. A woman did what she had to do, just as men did. I left her sitting in the tattered velvet chair and went back to Pretty. It was her day, not Kara’s.

Bonnie still stood, stony, beside Pretty’s flower-strewn chair.

Mike returned from the parley looking pleased, a rare look for him. The other pack, smaller than ours, was not only unwilling to go to war over the urban forest but was interested in trading, even in possible joint hunting and foraging trips. I knew without being told that Mike hoped to eventually unite the two packs and become chief of both. The men brought back gifts from the other pack. Evidently their base had heaps of things so sealed in plastic—blankets, pillows, even clothing—that no rats had gotten into them and they looked almost new. Each of the girls got a fluffy white robe stitched with “St. Regis Hotel.”

“Can’t we move to a hotel?” Lula cried, twirling around in hers.

“Too hard to defend,” Karl said. He reached up to catch Lula and pull her onto his lap. She giggled. Lula has always liked Karl; she maintained that she “knows” he fathered Jaden. Jaden did have his bright blue eyes.

We were all at Pretty’s ceremony feast in the common room, an underground room in what Grandmother remembered as the New York State Theater. The common room had a wooden floor, a curious wooden rail on three sides, and a smashed, unusable piano in one corner. The boys had swept up the huge amount of mirror glass that yesterday lay all around. Junie had spread blankets on the floor for the feast, which tasted wonderful. Rabbit shot that morning and roasted with wild onions over open fires built on the stone terrace in front of the Vivian Beaumont. Cans of beans that Eric had brought back from foraging. A salad of dandelion greens and the candy that Pretty so loved and I had been hoarding since winter: maple sap mixed with nuts. Every lantern we owned was lit, giving the room a romantic glow.

Mike eyed Pretty, who blushed and cast eyes at him. The younger men watched enviously. I didn’t have much sympathy for them. They were at the bottom of the sex list, of course, and, they didn’t get much. Too bad—they should have treated Bonnie better when they had her.

Besides Bonnie, two of the young men seemed unaware of the heavy scent of sex filling the common room. Guy and Jemmy kept giving me significant looks, and eventually I got up from my dinner and went to them. “Do you need me?”

“I have a pain,” Jemmy said, loud enough for Mike to hear. Jemmy was a terrible actor. His eyes shone, and every muscle in his body tensed with excitement. I had never seen anybody less in pain.

I went to Mike. “Jemmy is ill. I’m taking him to the sickroom to examine, in case it’s contagious.”

Mike nodded, too absorbed by Pretty to pay much attention.

Jemmy and I slipped out. Guy followed with a lantern. As soon as we were beyond earshot of the sullen guard—he was missing the feast—I said to Jemmy, “Well?”

“We want to show you something. Please come, Nurse!”

The pack had raised Jemmy since he was six and his mother died. He had a lively curiosity but, unlike Guy, Jemmy had never learned to read, although not because he shared the men’s usual scorn for reading as useless and feminine. Jemmy said that the letters jumped places in front of his eyes, which made no sense but seemed to be true, since otherwise he was intelligent. Too delicately built to ever be of much use to Mike, he could make any mechanical equipment function again. It was Jemmy who figured out how to get the generators we sometimes found to run on the fuel we also sometimes found. The generators never lasted long, and most of the machinery they were supposed to power had decayed or rusted beyond use, but every once in a while we got lucky. Until the fuel ran out.

“Is it another generator?” I asked.

“Half be that!” Jemmy said.

Guy added mysteriously, “No, one-third.”

But this arithmetic was too much for Jemmy, whose instincts about machinery were just that: instincts. He ignored Guy and pulled me along.

We went outside the building, across the square to the Vivian Beaumont, and to the rear of the building. It was dark out and there was a light drizzle, but the boys ignored it. I didn’t get much choice. In the little underground theater our single lantern cast a forlorn glow.

“You climb up there,” Jemmy said, pointing to the booth halfway up the wall. “The steps be gone, but I found a ladder.”

“I’m not going up a ladder,” I said, but of course I did. Their excitement was contagious. Also worrying: This was not the way Mike wanted his pack men to behave. In Mike’s mind, fighters spoke little and showed less.

I was no longer young nor agile, and the ladder was a trial. But, lit from above by the lantern Guy carried, I heaved myself into the small space. The first thing I saw was a pile of books. “Oh!”

“That’s not first,” Guy said gleefully, preventing me from snatching at one. “The other things first!”

I said, “Let go of those books!”

Jemmy, scampering up the ladder like a skinny squirrel, echoed, “The other things first!”

I demanded of Guy, “Where did you find the books?”

“Here.”

A noise filled the small space: another of Jemmy’s generators. I was far more interested in the books.

Jemmy said, “I can’t believe this still works! It be already connected or I don’t know how to do. Look!”

A flat window standing on a table flickered and glowed. A moment of surprise, and then the word came to me:
teevee
. Grandmother had told me about them. I never saw one work before, and when I was a child I confused
teevee
and
teepee,
so that I thought tiny people must live in the window, as we sometimes lived in teepees on summer forages.

They did.

She started out alone on the stage, except for words that appeared briefly below her:

P
AS
D
E
D
EUX
F
ROM
T
HE
F
OUR
T
EMPERAMENTS

M
USIC BY
P
AUL
H
INDEMITH

C
HOREOGRAPHY BY
G
EORGE
B
ALANCHINE

The girl wore tight, clinging clothes that Mike would never have permitted on his women: too inflaming for men far down the sex list. On her feet were flimsy pink shoes with pink ribbons and square toes. The girl raised one arm in a curve above her head and then raised her body up onto the ends of those pink shoes—how could she do that? Music started. She began to dance.

I heard myself gasp.

A man came onto the screen and they moved toward each other. She turned away from him, turned back, moved toward him. He lifted her then, waist-high, and carried her so that she seemed to float, legs stretched in a beautiful arch, across the stage. They danced together, all their movements light and precise and swift—so swift! It was achingly beautiful. Coiling around each other, the girl lifting her leg as high as her head, standing on her other on the ends of her toes. They flowed from one graceful pose to another, defying gravity. I had never seen anything so fragile, so moving. Never.

It lasted only a short time. Then the teevee went black.

“I can’t believe the cube still works!” Jemmy said gleefully. “Want to see the other one?”

But Guy said nothing. In the shadows cast upward from the lantern, his face looked much older, and almost in pain. He said, “What is it? What is it called?”

“Ballet,” I said.

Silently he handed me the pile of books. Three, four, five of them. The top one read in large gold letters:
The Story of Giselle
. The others were
A Ballet Companion: The Joy of Classical Dance,
Basic Ballet Positions,
Dancing for Mr. B.,
and a very small
2016 Tour Schedul
e.

Guy shivered. Jemmy, oblivious to all but his mechanical miracle, said, “The other one be longer. See, these cubes fit into this slot. Only two cubes still work, though.”

White words on a black screen: TAKING CLASS ON VIDEO. Then a whole roomful of women and men standing—oh! at wooden railings before mirrors; the place might be our common room, long ago. Music from a piano and then a woman’s voice said, “Plié … and
one
two three four. Martine, less tense in your hand. Carolyn, breathe with the movement …”

They were not on the ends of their toes, not until partway through “class.” Before that came strange commands from the unseen woman:
battement tendu,
rondes de jambs a terre,
porte de bras
. After they rose on the ends of their toes—but only the women, I noticed—came more commands: “Jorge, your hand looks like a dead chicken—hold the fingers loosely!” “No, no, Terry—you are doing
this,
and you should be doing
this
.” Then the woman herself appeared, and she looked as old or older than I, although much slimmer.

“Now center work … No, that is too slow, John, and one and one and one … good. Now an
arabesque penchée
… Breathe with it, softly, softly …”

On the teevee, dancers doing impossible, bewitching things with their bodies.

“Again … Timon, please start just before the arabesque …”

A roomful of dancers, each with one leg rising slowly behind, arms curved forward, to balance on one foot and make a body line so exquisite that my eyes blurred.

The teevee again went black. Jemmy said, “Let’s not play it again—I want to save fuel.” Guy, to my astonishment, knelt before me, as if he were doing atonement to Mike.

“Nurse, I need your help,” he said.

“Get up, you young idiot!”

“I need your help,” he repeated. “I want to bring Kara here, and I can’t without you.”

Kara. All at once, certain speculative looks he has given her sprang into my mind. I pushed him away, scandalized. “Guy! You can’t bed Kara! Why, she hasn’t Begun, and even if she had, Mike would kill you!”

“I don’t want to bed her!” He rose, looking no less desperate but much more determined. “I want to dance with her.”

“Dance with her!”

“Like that.” He gestured toward the blank teevee and tried out his new word, with reverence. “Ballet.”

Even Jemmy looked shocked. “Guy—you can’t do that!”

“I can learn. So can Kara.”

I said the first thing that came into my mind, which, like most first things, was idiotic. “The Nurse on the teevee said it takes years of work to become a dancer!”

“I know,” Guy said, “years to be like them be. But we could learn
some,
Kara and me, and maybe dance for the pack. Mike might like that.”

“Mike like a girl who has not yet Begun to be handled by you? You’re crazy, Guy!”

“I have to dance,” he said doggedly. “Ballet. With Kara. She be the only one possible!”

He was right about that. Pretty, spoiled and conventional, would never learn the hard things which that dance Nurse had demanded. Tiny and Seela were too young, Lula and Junie busy with children, Bonnie big and ungainly—what was I thinking? The whole thing was not only ridiculous, but dangerous.