“Well, but I don’t mean impertinence. I’m trying to learn. If you—if anyone—thought that statement was true, then it isn’t in conflict with the boring bossy bit that preceded it. It’s just argument and conclusion, and I don’t see the irony.”
“You don’t see much, Miss Elphaba,” said Madame Morrible. “You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. To be stuck in ignorance, to be circumscribed by the walls of one’s own modest acumen, well, it is very sad in one so young and bright.” She spit out the last word, and it seemed to Galinda, somehow, a low comment on Elphaba’s skin color, which today was indeed lustrous with the effort of public speaking.
“But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond,” said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up.
“In the case of poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may indeed be true. Animals should not be heard,” snapped Madame Morrible.
“Do you mean that ironically?” said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face, and did not look up again for the rest of the session.
4
When the second semester began, and Galinda was still saddled with Elphaba as a roomie, she made a brief protest to Madame Morrible. But the Head would allow no shifting, no rearranging. “Far too upsetting for my other girls,” she said. “Unless you’d like to be removed to the Pink Dormitory. Your Ama Clutch seems, to my watchful eye, to be recovering from the ailments you described when first we met. Perhaps now she is up to overseeing fifteen girls?”
“No, no,” said Galinda quickly. “There are recurrences from time to time, but I don’t mention them. I don’t like to be a bother.”
“How thoughtful,” said Madame Morrible. “Bless you, sweet thing. Now my dear, I wonder if we might take a moment, as long as you’ve come in for a chat, to discuss your academic plans for next fall? As you know, second year is when girls choose their specialties. Have you given it any thought?”
“Very little,” said Galinda. “Frankly, I thought my talents would just emerge and make it clear whether I should try natural science, or the arts, or sorcery, or perhaps even history. I don’t think I’m cut out for ministerial work.”
“I’m not surprised that one such as you should be in doubt,” said Madame Morrible, which wasn’t greatly encouraging to Galinda. “But may I suggest sorcery? You could be very good at it. I pride myself on knowing this sort of thing.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Galinda, though her early appetite for sorcery had waned once she’d heard what a grind it was to learn spells and, worse, to understand them.
“In the event you choose sorcery, it might—just might—be possible to find for you a new roomie,” said Madame Morrible, “given that Miss Elphaba has already told me her interests lie in the natural sciences.”
“Oh well then, I certainly will give it a great deal of thought,” said Galinda. She struggled with unnamed conflicts within her. Madame Morrible, for all her upper-class diction and fabulous wardrobe, seemed just a tad—oh—dangerous. As if her big public smile were composed of the light glancing off knives and lances, as if her deep voice masked the rumbling of distant explosions. Galinda always felt as if she couldn’t see the whole picture. It was disconcerting, and to her credit at least Galinda felt inside herself the ripping apart of some valuable fabric—was it integrity?—when she sat in Madame Morrible’s parlor and drank the perfect tea.
“For the sister, I hear, is eventually coming up to Shiz,” concluded Madame Morrible a few minutes later, as if silence had not intervened, and several tasty biscuits, “because there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And that, I understand, would be dreadful. You would not like it. The sister being as she is. Undoubtedly spending much time in Miss Elphaba’s room, being tended to.” She smiled wanly. A puff of powdery aroma came forward from the flank of her neck, almost as if Madame Morrible could somehow dispense a pleasant personal odor at will.
“The sister being as she is.” Madame Morrible tutted and wagged her head back and forth as she saw Galinda to the door. “Miserable, really, but I suppose we shall all pull together and cope. That is sorority, isn’t it?” The Head grasped her shawl and put a gentle hand on Galinda’s shoulder. Galinda shivered, and was sure Madame Morrible felt it, knew it, but the Head never registered a sign of it. “But then, my use of sorority—how ironic. Too witty. Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.” She squeezed Galinda’s shoulder blade as if it were a bicycle handle, almost harder than was proper for a woman to do. “We can only hope—ha ha—that the sister comes with some veils of her own! But that’s a year yet. Meanwhile we have time. Think about sorcery, would you? Do. Now good-bye, my pet, and fresh dreams.”
Galinda walked back to her room slowly, wondering what Elphaba’s sister was like to provoke those catty remarks about veils. She wanted to ask Elphaba. But she couldn’t think of how to do it. She didn’t have the nerve.
Boq
I
Come on out,” said the boys. “Come out.” They were leaning in the archway to Boq’s room, a pell-mell clot of them, backlit by the oil lamp in the study beyond. “We’re sick of books. Come with us.”
“Can’t,” said Boq. “I’m behind in irrigation theory.”
“Fuck your irrigation theory when the pubs are open,” said the strapping Gillikinese bucko named Avaric. “You’re not going to improve your grades at this late date, with the exams almost over and the examiners half-crocked themselves.”
“It’s not the grades,” said Boq. “I just don’t understand it yet.”
“We’re off to the pub, we’re off to the pub,” chanted some boys who, it seemed, had gotten a head start. “Fuck Boq, the ale is waiting, and it’s already aged enough!”
“Which pub, then, maybe I’ll join you in an hour,” Boq said, sitting firmly back in his chair and not lifting his feet to the footstool, as he knew that this might incite his classmates to hoist him to their shoulders and carry him off with them for an evening of debauchery. His smallness seemed to inspire such banditry. Feet square on the floor made him look more planted, he figured.
“The Boar and Fennel,” said Avaric. “They’ve got a new witch performing. They say she’s hot. She’s a Kumbric Witch.”
“Hah,” said Boq, unconvinced. “Well, go on and get a good view. I’ll come along when I can.”
The boys rambled away, rattling doors of other friends, knocking aslant the portraits of old boys now grown into august patrons. Avaric stood in the archway and waited a minute longer. “We might ditch some of the boors and take a select few of us off to the Philosophy Club,” he said enticingly. “Later on, I mean. It’s the weekend, after all.”
“Oh, Avaric, go take a cold shower,” said Boq.
“You admitted you were curious. You did. So why not an end-of-semester treat?”
