The sisters have survived; they grow; they grow apart.
“All sisters hate each other before they come around,” says Nanny, with a bland lack of conviction, since she has no sisters, and is grateful for it.
Nessa’s neediness siphons off attention previously paid to Elphie. In time, Elphie comes to realize a debt of gratitude—a gratitude she resents having to observe. But observe it she does, as Nessa turns into more of a person and less a scrap of accident.
The younger sister can’t stand on her own feet because her balance is imperfect. That’s the assumption, anyway. She’s come into the world a defenseless babe—armless, in fact. (Nanny has tried tickling at the ends of the baby’s shoulder blades, hoping she might tease the limbs into a late sprouting.)
Some back in Munchkinland, thanks to the gossip of attendant midwives, have fatalistically considered Nessa’s deformity a collateral cost of the relief from the seven-year drought. A cost piled onto that shabby murder in the forecourt, that is: a top-up, a deal clincher. The drought is over, after all.
This second great-grandchild of the Eminence. Nessarose Thropp, was born at Colwen Grounds. No hiding her handicap, if that’s not too cruel a word to use for her particular affliction. And as Frex is a self-important minister with presumed ties to the Unnamed God, this makes the punishment meted out upon his second daughter more pointed. More poignant. (More delicious—though the poor child!)
Nessa could eventually become the Eminent Thropp, were her sister Elphaba to die first or abdicate the title. If so, Nessa’s limitations would be on permanent display. Two children born with irregularities! (Yes, word about Elphie has finally gotten out.) Could Melena Thropp do nothing right in the birthing tent? If Melena as the Thropp Second Descending tries one more time, and comes up with an unblemished child, perhaps both of her older children can quietly disappear from the line of succession, and from history, and a third and more perfect candidate be designated to carry the standard. Such a break from protocol has never been advanced, but come on—a green Eminence? Or an Eminence without a full complement of limbs? A little thinking outside the box here, people. Third time’s the charm. If only Melena is still fertile, can carry another baby to term.
So Melena sets herself to the task, but her body is having none of it.
Elphie is spared knowledge of her mother’s failed pregnancies, and of the parade of miscarriages. Weird poppet though she is, Elphie is as myopic as any other kid. She doesn’t grasp how her parents are subsiding ever more deeply into Quadling Country as she grows. The child knows little of life but tents and stakes, cots and sleeping rolls, kitchen pots and sacks of rice, trunks of tattered leather in which the family has hauled scraps of their past and out of which they dress. Life is vitality, instability, curiosity. Home is portable. Personnel come and go. Elphie doesn’t remember how and when and why Snapper disappears, or Severin. Boozy, of all of them, proves the most reliable, or at any rate when the cook skives off it is seldom for more than a few weeks. She always returns before the family’s temporary posting is nearing its end. One year she comes back pregnant herself, but loses it. She says she coughed the unviable baby up through her throat in the middle of the night. “That one is hexed,” she says, pointing at Elphie. “It’s her fault.” By now Boozy has learned enough of the common speech to be offensive. Nanny opines that Boozy points fingers where they hadn’t ought be pointed. And she’ll pay for it.
“What’s hexed?” asks Elphaba, when Boozy has sauntered away.
“Touched with a little power of magic,” says Nanny blandly.
“Don’t put ideas in her head,” says Melena.
“You thought so, too, when she was born,” Nanny reminds Melena.
“Is Nessarose hexed?” asks Elphie, but as the subject is deemed improper, nobody will answer her. So Elphie decides that Nessa must be hexed, too. That night in the tent, or soon thereafter anyway—she may be about seven, and Nessa five—Elphie raises the matter solemnly.
“I’m going to blow out the snail-oil lamp and tell you a secret,” says the big sister.
“A good one?”
“You can decide. It’s about hexes.”
“Don’t like no hexes.”
“You don’t even know what they are.”
“They bite.”
Elphie thinks: Maybe Nessa is right about that. Then she says, “No, you’re thinking about foxes. Hexes are little magicks, I think.”
“Magic tricks?”
“Tricks for some. For others hexes are for real, not tricks.”
“Hex hex hex.” Nessa tries out the word. “Like what real tricks?” She is a skeptic.
“Like—” Elphie doesn’t quite know what a hex is, either. She glances around. In the small basin of water sits a smooth black stone, which Boozy says absorbs enough of the water’s sulfur smell that the little girls can bring themselves to sip if they are thirsty enough. (Another kind of magic?) Using a spoon, Elphie nudges out the thing, which when dried off, rolls in her palm, egg-shaped and opaque. “I’ll hex this into a marsh plum for your breakfast.” Elphie knows that Nessa is partial to marsh plums.
“You can’t. Can you? Show me. Then show me how.”
“I can’t hex it in the light.” Elphie puffs down the glass chimney of the oil lamp, extinguishing the flame. The swamp night is clouded and the darkness near total. She sets the stone down with a clunk upon the clothes trunk between them. “Abracanexus, abracahexus,” she intones in a low voice, while her sister moans in fake terror.
“Did it work?” asks Nessa.
“It doesn’t happen right away. It takes time. Like making a baby.”
“How much time does it take to make a baby?”
“I don’t know, but it’s more than a minute.”
“So when will you light the lamp and show me the marsh plum?”
“It has to wait till morning. Go to sleep.”
“Will it be a green one?”
“Yes,” said Elphie, and then, “and it won’t have little arms, either.”
Nessa works this out and concludes happily: “So it’ll be like both of us.”
“Shut up and close your eyes.” Elphie lies down in her own cot. Usually Nessa drifts into sleep quickly. Tonight when she drops off, Elphie plans to get up and steal to the larder box and pinch a marsh plum from Boozy’s supplies. She’ll replace the stone with a plum. Nessa will think her big sister can do magicks. Elphie isn’t sure what use she can make of such a truth swindle, but something will occur to her. The leverage is bound to come in handy.
Restless Nessa keeps muttering, “Is it morning yet?” While Elphie waits for her sister to nod off, she falls asleep herself. “Elphie, Elphie,” says Nessa, who today wakes up earlier, “it’s morning, look and see!”
“Fiddleferns,” says Elphie, the only swear word tolerated by the grown-ups. She rubs her eyes and begins to scrabble about in her mind for a plausible lie to explain why the stone is still a stone.
Only she doesn’t need any such alibi. On the chest sits a small lumpy marsh plum with a leaf still attached to the stem. Almost too perfect to be true, like a painting of a plum. Like the most perfect idea of a plum that anyone who ever thought of such a thing could come up with. Every other plum in history anticipates this ideal specimen, every future marsh plum deviates from it.
“You’re so good at hexing,” whispers Nessa.
“I know that,” says Elphie, afraid to get too close, afraid to touch it. But it just sits there, smelling faintly of its plummy life. She eventually kicks her legs off her cot and leans forward and touches it. She isn’t sure about it. Maybe it’s going to burn her, or explode. Or disappear. It does nothing, just rocks on its shadow a little and settles back. There’s no black stone behind it. Nor has the stone magicked itself back into the water basin from where it has been plucked. It’s just gone.
“What does it mean?” asks Nessa. “I mean, that you could do that?”
“It means I’m older than you.”
“Can you teach me?”
“Teach you how to hex? No. It’s just something you can do, if you can do it. Like whistle. Or walk.” This is cruel of her to say, and she knows it.
“I can whistle,” says Nessa, a short little lie. She can’t do that yet, though maybe one day she’ll grow into it. Will she ever develop enough strength in her back to walk on her own? “Put me in the cart and let’s go tell Mama and Nanny and Father.”
The cart is a wicker wheelbarrow that some Quadlings worked up for Nessarose a year or two back. She will outgrow it before long, but for now she is still small enough that Elphie can lift her from the cot and set her more or less in a sitting position. Pillows tucked on both sides of Nessa ensure that she won’t fall over. Elphie isn’t strong enough to do slopes, either uphill or down. Sometimes she wonders what would happen if she lost control of the cart at the top of a slope. She imagines it pitching forward. But sooner or later the back legs would settle onto the ground and the front wheel jolt to a stop, and the vehicle would park itself. Perhaps rather suddenly. Then there would be a terrific spill-out. But nothing worse than that.
“Bring the magic marsh plum,” says Nessa. “We have to show everybody.”
“They won’t like it,” says Elphie. “They don’t like hexes. All lies and trickery.”
“Then hold it up for me so I can take a bite.”
Not sure exactly what kind of charm she might be administering to her sister, but curious about the effects, Elphie does as she is told. What if this magicked marsh plum grows Nessarose some arms at last? Good thing or bad news?
The juice runs down Nessa’s chin, and Elphie wipes Nessa’s face dry with the edge of her blanket. “How does it taste?”
“You try it, too.”
But Elphie doesn’t dare. “Don’t say anything to them.”
“Why not?”
Elphie pouts, but she is behind Nessa, at the handles of the cart, and realizes Nessa can’t see her. “Father is a minister. That means he thinks magicks are bad.”
Nessa screws her face up in concentration. “It’s a good plum. You’re a good cook.”
“Thank you. But shut up about it.”
Elphie has yet to work out when being bossy to Nessa is counterproductive. Nessa can get all stroppy and turncoat. But the younger child promises to hold her tongue about the matter, at least in front of Melena and Frex. There they are, in front of the marital tent. Melena stands with both palms flattened netherward upon her hips. Her stomach pushes out in front. On his campstool, Frex hunches with his pipe and his scholar’s tracts, making notes in the margins. Boozy is gently scorching a breakfast porridge over the fire.
“Oh, look at the big sister being such a good big sister,” says Nanny, threateningly, since she can read the temptation to overturn Nessa in Elphie’s eyes.
“We got hexed,” says Nessa brightly, not for the first time ignoring Elphie’s counsel. “I got hexed.”
“You and me both,” says Melena.
“Oh, Mellie-belly,” says Frex. “You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”
“And you know I don’t like that nickname, especially when I’m in a condition. So guard your tongue better or I’ll order up a hex designed especially for you.”
Nessa tries again. “Elphie turned a stone into a plum.”
“Now hush, you child, none of your nonsense.” Nanny hurries in to salvage the moment, but Frex lifts his chin from his right fist and swivels his head.
“What are you prattling about, Nessa?”
She’s started, she can’t stop; it is hard for Nessa to get any attention other than food, medicine, or hygienic care. She takes her moment. “Elphie said that hexes are real and she knows how to hexy-hex something and she did it. She turned the water-stone into a marsh plum.”
“She couldn’t possibly.” Frex’s voice comes out less assured than he has intended to sound. “You’re playing a game, or she’s playing a game on you. Elphaba, admit to your sister you were lying. Tell her you’re sorry. The truth is hard enough to come by in this life, and that’s why we need ministers. Fooling around with make-believes is unkind. It’s a cheat. And it can be, well, a little dangerous.”
“I don’t fool around,” growls Elphie, looking at the ground.
“She gave me some of it, the magic plum. A bite. It was good.”
Frex looks at his oldest daughter. “Are you teaching your sister to be tricksy? She’s going to need sobriety and clarity in this life, Elphaba, not deceptions.”
“She did it herself,” says Elphie. “I thought up the idea but I think she wanted it so much that she made the hex happen.”
“I did not!” cries Nessa. Still, a hint of happiness threads through her outrage. What if she did? The powerless have nothing but hope.
“Really, deal with all this, Nanny, earn your keep,” says Melena. “But first, unlace my morning shoes. I can’t bend down at this point, and they’re choking my feet. I’m every inch a balloon. Even my hair feels tight on my head.”
It falls to Boozy to wheel Nessa away, Elphie scuffing in the sandy grit of the clearing behind them. They settle far enough beyond that their voices won’t carry. They talk in that patois of Qua’ati and Ozish particular to the family camp.
Boozy is the one who first mentioned hexes, so she’s the right one to grill. Elphie reminds the cook that she said Elphie was hexed. What did she really mean? What does magicking a marsh plum out of a stone have to do with anything?
At first Boozy is reluctant to discuss the subject. She hums and mutters and allows that the way this family talks about stuff, as if everything is in a tin box of its own meaning and doesn’t touch anything else or ever change, so weird and bizarre, she can’t work with that. If Boozy says something in the morning and she says it again at sunset, it doesn’t have to mean the same thing and she can’t make it mean the same thing and sometimes she can’t tell what it means anyway.
“So what are you saying,” says Elphie, who still thinks concretely, in objects, not notions, “that nothing is”—she hunts for a word to mean stable but it isn’t immediate to her—“that nothing is fixed?”
“Water come to ice, come to air, leave the pot on a hot morning and come down again on a rainy afternoon. It always moving even when it look stopped and still. That what hex is.”
“So why did you say I was hexed?” asks Elphie.
“Why I say it yesterday and why I say it today, could be two different things,” explains Boozy. “That the whole idea. Things change. You change.”
“So do I,” says Nessa, “so do you. Sometimes you wear that black skirt, sometimes the ugly stripey one.”
“You don’t change like your sister do. She the sly one. Green little girl on the outside, who know what on the inside. Maybe she a piece of green moon fell on the ground. You,” says Boozy to Nessa, “you got the took-away arms that you can’t see. She has the added something that you can’t see. I don’t know what it is because I can’t see it either. But it’s there. She hexed. She raw. It not a good thing it not a bad thing. Don’t fret about it. Tomorrow if you ask me again I say something else, and it will be just as true. Or just as wrong. But I know one thing. I’m not hexed. I’m just me, as Boozy as Boozy can be, and no more. And never will be more.”
She reaches in her apron pocket. “While we’re waiting for them to settle down and call for their breakfast, you want a marsh plum to keep your stomach calm?” She pulls out a sour-looking fruit, nothing like the magnificent item that has appeared on the trunk in the girls’ tent.
Elphie thinks: Maybe Boozy was pacing around outside the tent and heard me talking, and made a switch of the plum and the stone just to trick us. Have some fun.
When she goes back to the girls’ tent, the magicked perfect marsh plum is gone. She doesn’t remember what she did with it after holding it for Nessa to take a bite. Had she tossed it on the ground, or out the tent flap? She looks into the bowl of evening water. The black stone has returned. It sits unblinking and accusatory underneath the skin of water, as if it has never left its post to parade about as a marsh plum, on a sweet anonymous morning in the marsh country.