Strange Sisters (10 page)

She tugged fiercely against his restraint, and he released her suddenly. She stumbled back, regained her balance, and ran out of the room and upstairs. On her bed, she lay face downward, her body racked by dry, convulsive sobs. The sobs tore her throat, detonated against her ear drums. She didn't hear Stella come after her into the room, was not conscious of her until she felt the touch of fingers on her head. She remained in the position into which she had thrown herself, but after a while the sobs subsided, and Stella's voice sounded clearly from the darkness behind her.

"Kathy, Kathy, how can I understand you? It's so simple, darling. So natural. Just a man and a woman getting married. Do you think you will be excluded? It won't be that way at all. There will be three of us instead of two, no more than that. I'm still young, still pretty, I'm in love. Felix wants to marry me, and I want to marry him. Is that so disturbing? Is that so difficult to understand? If it is, if you can't understand, for God's sake tell me why so that I can at least try to understand you."

She knew, of course, by that time she could hardly help knowing, but the truth was such a monstrous distortion of nature as nature functioned in herself that she found it incredible as well as monstrous, and so she would not accept it. She stood waiting in the darkness by the bed, dreading the response she might elicit, the normal warmth of her heart dispelled by pervading cold.

Kathy rolled over on the bed and sat on the edge, reaching out for the soft white blur of Stella's hand. "Please don't marry him, Stella. Please, please, please don't marry him."

"But I
want
to marry him. Why shouldn't I marry him?"

"You can't. You just can't"

"That's no reason, darling. Surely you can see that."

"It would be the end of you and me. Nothing would ever be the same again."

"Nonsense. Felix is very fond of you. He wouldn't come between us in any way."

"You don't understand! Oh, Stella, you don't understand!"

"I'm sure I don't. And I want to. Can't you
make
me understand?"

Kathy was silent, and the moon looked through the window, and below the window in the June night the scarlet roses were great drops of blood. Her voice returned with a gasp that was pain, real physical pain ripping her throat. "The things you'll do! All the things!"

"What in God's name do you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

"Yes. I'm afraid I do. Oh, my darling, it's nothing wrong. Intimacy is natural and good and necessary for men and women in love. It was meant to be that way."

"Not with him!"

"I'm the one to decide that."

"Not with him, Stella! Not with him!"

In the darkness, her hand caught between hot, clutching hands, Stella drew a deep, ragged breath, feeling confused and frustrated and bitterly compassionate, and she thought to herself, I'm making too much of it, I'm giving it too heavy a touch, because she's little more than a child, and a child needs the light touch and laughter, to be shown with sympathy how foolish she is.

So she said with a smile in her voice, "Who, then? Have you chosen someone for me?"

And it was a mistake. It was a question that shouldn't have been asked, because, although it was never answered, the answer was naked and understood in both their minds, stripped by the question itself, and it was too late to pretend ever again that the answer didn't exist.

Stella released her hand and stood very still, looking at the naked thing in her mind. She felt ill and, in a vague, unformulated, undiagnosed way, a disturbing sense of guilt. What have I done? she thought. Or what have I not done that should have been done? How does one see these things in time, and what does one do about them when they are seen?

She spoke very carefully. "Felix and I are being married, darling. Tomorrow. In the city. We are driving to the city tonight, and will be gone a few days. Bertha will be in tomorrow as usual. She'll prepare your meals and take care of the house. If you want her to stay nights with you, I'm sure she can arrange it. When we get back, we'll talk this all out. We'll see together how foolish it all is. You and I, darling. You'll be all right, won't you?"

There was no spoken answer to this question, either, though it, too, might have been considered implicit if one had had the courage to consider it at all, and Stella turned and walked to the door. She turned there and looked back for a moment, and because she was a warm and generous woman, she was filled with sorrow and compassion and the sense of guilt.

"I'm so sorry, darling," she said, and she went out.

After a long time, the door opened and closed below. The Cadillac started in the street. Kathy sat in the chair above the roses and prayed.

God, let him die,
she prayed.
Oh, God in heaven, let him die tonight. Let him die, God. God, God, God, let him die, die, die.

The moon climbed slowly the arc of the sky and quit looking in the window. The roses stirred and shook their scent loose in the night. The street light at the corner inscribed a yellow circle on the dark earth. Time quit being one day and became another. Kathy quit praying and went to sleep.

In her chair above the roses, she slept.

Out on the highway, Felix Brannon died. Stella didn't.

Stella lived for several hours.

She was caught in the centrifugal action, whirled around and around the circumference of the conical world. Then she was flung out of the whirling mass in a great, high dizzy arc, and she was standing alone at a great altitude on an arid lip of rock. Below her was the world, and the world was no longer a whirling spiral of many colors but was now a colorless and desolate cup of perfect stillness. Above and beyond her, outside the world, there was a sound like rollicking thunder, and pretty soon she identified it as the laughter of God. God sat on an electron with His feet on a proton and held His sides and laughed and laughed and laughed with the rollicking, thunderous laughter. Leaning forward from the lip of rock, she stuck a finger into the cup of the world and found that it was dry. She pushed the cup away from her and said to God, "Fill it up. Fill up the cup of the world."

"Lady," said the bartender, "you've had enough. Don't you think you've had enough?"

She looked at the bartender, and he was not a man. Neither was he a woman. Neither a he nor a she was he. He was an It. It was an It. How beautiful and considerate was the English language to have the neuter gender, a wonderful and wide and pacific category that was neither one thing nor the other. Other languages weren't like that. Some other languages. Spanish, for example. She had studied Spanish in high school, and she had hated it because nothing was neuter, everything was he or she. Even pens and pencils were he and she. El and la. She was very clever to remember that from away back in high school. Good morning, Mr. Pencil. Good morning, Miss Pen. No neuter. Never any beautiful It. The neuter was a green and quiet little island in a stormy sea, and you swam and swam in the stormy sea until your arms and legs were like lead, and the soul inside you was exhausted and indifferent, and just when you decided to quit swimming and sink into the dark water, you came to the little neuter island, and you climbed up onto it and rested, and after a while your muscles and your soul were ready to swim again.

She said to the bartender, "The cup of the world is empty, It. Fill up the cup, It."

"Please, lady," he said. "You've had enough."

"Enough?" She looked at him slyly and laughed. "You are so right, It. I've had enough. I've had more than enough, if you only knew it. Do you hear that sound? If you listen very closely, you can hear it. It's like thunder a long way off. Do you know what it is? It's God laughing. It's God laughing because I've had enough."

"You just take it easy, lady. I'll tell you what. You get back in the booth, and I'll bring you some nice black coffee."

She clapped her hands softly. "That's a good idea. Oh, that's a fine idea." She leaned forward across the bar and whispered, "Tell me. It, is God an It?"

"I don't know anything about God, lady. I don't like to talk about things like that."

She laughed gleefully and clapped her hands again. "Things. Things, you said. A thing is an It, isn't it? Of course a thing is an It. So you answered my question. Of course you know something about God. Everyone knows about God, and everyone talks about God, but no one
does
anything about God."

She took time to think about that last bit, and to laugh a little more. It struck her as being a very clever thing to say, even if it wasn't exactly something she had thought of entirely by herself. It was a kind of twist on something someone had said about the weather, but it required a certain amount of cleverness just to remember things and make twists on them. Things like that just came into her mind. Like Macbeth and Shakespeare and the bit about sleep. Like the color of the hair.

She quit laughing and said, "What color is God's hair?"

"I wouldn't know, lady. I've never seen God."

"That's too bad. It would be very interesting to know the color of His hair. Do you suppose he's bald, like you? Do you understand that you're very fortunate to be bald?"

"I never figured I was so lucky. I spent a fortune on tonics."

"Oh? Did you have hair once?"

"Sure I had hair. Everyone has hair sometime."

"Tell me something. This is very important, so you must tell me the truth. What color was your hair when you had hair?"

"I'm not sure, lady. It's been so long I've almost forgotten. It was just sort of hair-colored hair, I think."

She straightened in a kind of triumphant posture, swaying a little on the stool, and looked at him with wide eyes. "You see? You
are
fortunate. You're one of God's fortunate children. God loved you and gave you hair-colored hair and then made you bald. Because when you have hair-colored hair or no hair at all, there is no question. The color's the thing. If the color isn't right, it's very bad for you. You should thank God because He gave you hair-colored hair and made you bald."

"Okay, lady. Thanks, God."

She nodded and leaned forward again abruptly, halting the collapse of her body with her elbows on the bar. She liked this bartender. She had great faith in him because he was an It and because he was bald and had once had hair-colored hair.

"Now you must tell me the truth again," she said. "Please don't spare me because you have a kind heart. Look at me and tell me truthfully what color
my
hair is."

"It's brown, lady. Dark brown. Very pretty, too."

She took hold of a lock and pulled it down across her forehead in front of her eyes and examined it closely. She said sadly, "You didn't tell the truth. You lied to me. I'm sure you meant it kindly, and I thank you for being kind, but to tell me a lie was really the most unkind thing of all. Shall I tell you the color of my hair?"

"It looks brown to me."

"It's not. It's nameless. It's abominable. The nameless and abominable color of my hair."

Again she was overwhelmed by self-pity. She let her head fall forward gently onto her forearms, and the silent tears gathered and fell down onto the bar. She was alone on a lip of rock above the empty cup of the world, and God thought it was funny and laughed, and there was really nothing to be done about it by anyone at all, not even a bald-headed It who meant to be kind.

The bartender thought wearily that this one was really the frosting on the cake. He'd seen a lot of wacky dames in his life, you met all kinds tending bar, but this one was worse than wacky. This one was meat for a psycho ward. Talking about God. Talking about the color of hair. Telling a guy he was lucky to have a head like an egg. He cursed softly and came around the bar to her side. He shook her gently.

"Look, lady. How about the coffee? The nice black coffee?"

She lifted her head and peered at him through tumbled hair of nameless color that looked brown. "Oh, yes. Fill up the cup with coffee. Fill up the empty cup of the world with hot black coffee."

She slipped off the stool and sagged, and he supported her weight tiredly. "Easy, lady. Just take it easy. Just come along this way."

He guided her back to the booth, and she sat down on the leather-covered seat and lay her head down on the table. He looked down at her and shook his head slowly from side to side and cursed again under his breath, wearily and bitterly and not without a certain compassion. Crazy-talking dame. Headed for a psycho ward, this one. Headed for the big break, God help her. There. She even had him thinking about God. He turned and went for the coffee.

She sat with her head on her arms and heard him move away, but she was not there in a real sense at all. Neither was she any longer on the lip of the world listening to the laughter of God. She was in the chair at the window above the roses, and she was listening to the harsh ringing of the telephone in the hall below.

The telephone rang in long, persistent bursts. She sat rigidly erect in the chair, thinking that she wouldn't answer, but then, after the deliberate delay, she was up and running in darkness toward the door in a contrary fear that she would be too late to answer before the party at the other end hung up.

She took the call on the upstairs extension, and the party on the other end was a starched impersonal voice that asked if it was Miss Kathryn Gait speaking.

"Yes," she said.

The starched voice identified itself as the General Hospital, as if it were an animated stack of stone and steel and mortar, and Kathy had a wild, random thought that if a hospital could really have talked, it would have talked with just such a voice. The voice said that Stella was an emergency case in the hospital. She had been brought in from the highway, where she had been involved in an accident. It would be advisable for Kathy to come at once.

She went. She left the phone uncradled and fled as she was down the stairs and outside, leaving open behind her the door through which Stella would not come again with one of her men, or her one man, neither tonight nor in a few days nor any time ever. The hospital was almost a mile across town, and she ran all the way, through light and darkness toward the terrible corollary to the answer to her prayer. In the hospital as she ran, without sound or portent or apparent consequence to earth, Stella died.