Nanny said, “Oooh, preserve me! You fine, fine man, don’t you know enough to fight fire with fire?”
“Nanny, enough,” said Melena.
“Hitting a feeble old woman,” said Nanny, hurt. “Who only tries to help.”
The next morning Nanny packed her valise. There was nothing more that she could do, and she wasn’t willing to live the rest of her life with a fanatical hermit and a ruined baby, even for the sake of Melena.
Frex drove Nanny back to the inn at Stonespar End, for the coach-and-four to take her home. Nanny knew Melena might still think about killing the child, but somehow she doubted it. Nanny held her valise to her ample bosom, fearing bandits again. Inside her valise was hidden her gold garter (she could always claim it had been planted there without her knowledge, whereas it would have been hard to claim it had been planted on her leg in the same circumstances). She also had squirreled away the ivory crochet hook, three of Frex’s prayer beads because she liked the carvings, and the pretty green glass bottle left behind by some itinerant salesman selling, apparently, dreams and passion and somnolence.
She didn’t know what she thought. Was Elphaba devil’s spawn? Was she half-elf? Was she punishment for her father’s failure as a preacher, or for her mother’s sloppy morals and bad memory? Or was she merely a physical ailment, a blight like a misshapen apple or a five-legged calf? Nanny knew her worldview was foggy and chaotic, pestered by demons, faith, and folk science. It didn’t escape her attention, however, that both Melena and Frex had believed uncompromisingly that they would have a boy. Frex was the seventh son of a seventh son, and to add to that powerful equation he was descended from six ministers in a row. Whatever child of either (or any) sex could dare follow in so auspicious a line?
Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.
The Quadling Glassblower
For one short, wet month, early in the next year, the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water, frothing at the hedges, bubbling at the roadside, splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower. Melena went about the yard in a state of mild undress, so that she could feel the sun on her pale skin and the deep warmth she had missed all winter. Strapped in her chair in the doorway, Elphaba, now a year and a half old, hit her breakfast minnow with the bowl of her spoon. “Oh, eat the thing, don’t mash it,” said Melena, but mildly. Since the child’s chin-sling had been removed, mother and daughter had begun to pay some attention to each other. To her surprise, Melena sometimes found Elphaba endearing, the way a baby should be.
This view was the only thing she had seen since leaving the elegant mansion of her family, the only thing she would ever gaze upon again—the windswept surface of Illswater, the distant dark stone cottages and chimneys of Rush Margins on the other side, the hills lying in a torpor beyond. She would go mad; the world was nothing but water and want. If a frolic of elves scampered through the yard she would leap on them for company, for sex, for murder.
“You father is a fraud,” she said to Elphaba. “Off finding himself all winter, leaving me with only you for company. Eat that breakfast, for you’ll get no more if you throw it on the ground.”
Elphaba picked up the fish and threw it on the ground.
“Your father is a charlatan,” continued Melena. “He used to be very good in bed for a religious man, and this is how I know his secret. Holy men are supposed to be above earthly pleasures, but your father enjoyed his midnight wrestling. Once upon a time! We must never tell him we know he’s a humbug, it would break his heart. We don’t want to break his heart, do we?” And then Melena burst into a high peal of laughter.
Elphaba’s face was unsmiling, unchanging. She pointed to the fish.
“Breakfast. Breakfast in the dirt. Breakfa
st for the bugs,” Melena said. She dropped the collar of her spring robe a little lower and the pink yoke of her bare shoulders gyrated. “Shall we go walk by the edge of the lake today and maybe you’ll drown?”
But Elphaba would never drown, never, because she would not go near the lake.
“Maybe we’ll go out in a boat and tip over!” Melena shrieked.
Elphaba cocked her head to one side as if listening for some part of her mother not intoxicated with leaves and wine.
The sun swept out from behind a cloud. Elphaba scowled. Melena’s robe dropped lower. Her breasts worked their way out from between the dirty ruffles of the collar.
Look at me, thought Melena, showing my breasts to the child I couldn’t give milk to for fear of amputation. I who was the rose of Nest Hardings, I who was the beauty of my generation! And now I am reduced to company I don’t even want, my own squirming thorny little girl. She is more grasshopper than girl, with those angular little thighs, those arching eyebrows, those poking fingers. She’s about the business of learning like any child, but she takes no delight in the world: She pushes and breaks and nibbles on things without any pleasure. As if she has a mission to taste and measure all the disappointments of life. In which Rush Margins is amply supplied. Mercy from the Unnamed God, she’s a creep, she is. She is.
“Or we might take a walk in the woods today and pick the last of the winter berries.” Melena was full of guilt at her lack of motherly feeling. “We can put them in a pie. Can we put them in a pie? Shall we, honey?”
Elphaba didn’t speak yet, but she nodded, and began to wiggle to get down. Melena started a clapping game Elphaba took no notice of. The child grunted and pointed to the ground, and arched her long elegant legs to illustrate her desire. Then she gestured to the gate leading from the kitchen garden and the hen yard.
There was a man at the uprights of the gate, leaning, shy and hungry-looking, with skin the color of roses at twilight: a dusky, shadowy red. He had a couple of leathern satchels on his shoulders and back, and a walking staff, and a dangerously handsome, hollow-looking face. Melena screeched and caught herself, directed her voice to a lower register. It had been so long since she had spoken to anyone but a whining toddler. “Good glory, you startled us!” she cried. “Are you searching for some breakfast?” She had lost the social touch. For instance, her breasts should not be staring at him so. Yet she did not clasp her gown.
“Please to forgive a sudden appearance by a strange foreigner at Lady’s gate,” said the man.
“Forgiven, of course,” she said impatiently. “Come in where I can see you—come in, come in!”
Elphaba had seen so few other people in her life that she hid one eye behind her spoon, and peeked with the other eye.
The man approached. His movements showed the clumsiness of exhaustion. He was large of ankle and thick of foot, slender about the waist and shoulders, and thick again in the neck—as if he had been made on a lathe, and worked too briefly at the extremities. His hands, letting down the satchels, seemed like beasts with minds of their own. They were outsized and splendid.
“Traveler not to know where he is,” said the man. “Two nights to cross the hills from Downhill Cornings. To look for the inn at Three Dead Trees. To rest.”
“You’re lost, you’ve veered,” said Melena, deciding not to be perplexed at his scrambled words. “No matter. Let me fix you a meal and you can tell me your story.” Her hands were at her hair, which once used to be thought precious as spun brass. At least it was clean.
