In the evening light, Nanny tells Elphie that she may bring her little sister around so they can visit with their mother, who is feeling poorly today.
“Today and every day,” says Elphie, who doesn’t understand the difference between poor and poorly—nor between poor and prosperous, for that matter.
Melena is in a state of dishabille, but this is normal for her. The girls might not have noticed except that there is so very much exposed belly. “Somebody eat a big lunch,” says Nessa.
“Come to Mama,” says Melena. Her hair is lank across her pillow. She’s thrown up a little. Nessa wrinkles her nose when Elphie wheels her closer. Melena stretches out her arms.
“What happened to your rings, they ran away,” says Nessa, peering at her mother’s fingers. Having none of her own, Nessa always attends to her mother’s.
“They just bounced right off didn’t they,” says Nanny. She is preparing a basin of warm water and soap and folding a stack of small flannels.
“I couldn’t bear the chafing.” Melena’s face twists. Nanny mutters some coded instruction, Melena grits her teeth against the ailment but comes back to herself. “Elphie, are you filching things from here and there? Boozy and the others tell me objects are developing lives of their own and walking about to take the air.”
“No.”
“You’d say no in any case. Just cut it out, Elphie.” Melena flags a hand limply at her older daughter as Nanny hoists Nessa onto the edge of the cot, where the girl lies, inert and cringing, in the lee of the tumulus that Melena has become. “Nessa, tell me,” says their mother, “is Elphie being a good big sister to you?”
Nessa shrugs. One of the more expressive bodily gestures she can make.
“I want you to be good, Elphaba Thropp,” says Melena. She says it twice more until Elphie finally lifts her chin and looks her mother in the eye. “I haven’t said so before, but I’m saying so now. I want you to tell me that you hear me.”
“Oh, I hear you,” says Elphie, too young to have perfected the withering ennui of adolescence, but practicing.
“You hear me and you remember what I say.”
“I found the missing tongs in the grass.” Elphie takes them out of her pocket.
“I know you be’d the one to snitch them,” says Boozy, who’s arrived with some malodorous tea. “Give them here, you pinching thief.”
“I never did, I never stole them or hexed them or anything’d them.” Elphie, hot in the cause of justice for herself. “I think there’s a lone monkey hanging around the camp. It’s been taking things.”
“The monkeys all fled, swum away through the trees, they don’t like jungle cats no more than we do,” says Boozy. “They smart and they keep to their own kind. No rogue monkey hanging around us, Elphie.”
“Elphie, don’t spout nonsense, you’re making it worse,” says Nanny. “Stop taking things, that’s all. Now give your mother a kiss. She isn’t feeling herself.”
“Then who do you feel like?” asks Elphie.
Melena’s face contorts. “I feel like a muskrat giving birth to a baby hippo. You girls better go.” Full-body pain wrings her for a moment. When she can catch her breath: “We’ll have a baby brother or sister for you soon. Elphie, no more stealing.”
“If I didn’t steal anything yet, I can’t do any more of it and I can’t do any less.”
“Mercy, the mouth on you. Go to law school, if they’ll have a girl like you. If they even take girls. Good-bye, my darlings.”
This is the only good-bye, casual, flung down like a damp kerchief. Good-bye.
They leave as Frex is arriving home in his punt. Ti’imit tells Frex he isn’t welcome in the tent now because the hour has arrived. Frex doesn’t hold with that peasant prohibition. He goes in to greet his wife and pray for her. Later, they largely agree this was the big mistake. Men visiting their wives in childbirth is not done.