She starts the next day, carrying a packet with the second garment and a couple of marsh plums for a midmorning snack. The old fellow, named Unger Bi’ix, Elphie has learned from Lei, is waiting. He has poured a bowl of tea for his new employee and it is still hot. “Set that parcel in the back room and then have a moment with me.”
Unger—he accedes to his own name and nods, and says Elphie may use it, but only respectfully—Unger hands Elphie the tea and puts her through some exercises in computing and then in reading. Nanny has taught Elphie numbers (“helpful for if you’re pinching a little from the pot; you never want to take too much or they’ll notice”) and Melena, one bored summer long ago, her letters; Frex has supplied holy texts for Elphie to struggle through. Reading is not a strength, though Unger admits the girl seems to have an instinct for mathematics as well as an assertive curiosity.
They finish the tea, which is possibly the first social event Elphaba has ever navigated on her own, standing on her own green shadow instead of in the umber-purples of Nanny’s or her father’s. Unger then shows Elphie the storeroom. He won’t let her touch his precious wares for fear of her staining them green. “A superstition I will grow out of, no doubt,” he admits, “but not today.” Carefully he unfolds the packet Elphie has brought, patting down its wrinkles. He intakes between his teeth in grudging appreciation. “A little my-old-auntie,” he says, “not a patch on the first one you brought in, but it’ll go in this market, yes indeed.”
He explains the systems of measuring cloth, and Elphie can watch, but not yet wield a scissors. He shows her a chart for cost. He tries to explain his system of bartering, lowering subtle taxations upon the socially ostentatious, while extending quiet allowances to those in distress, like the newly bereaved. “But a lot of people lie about losing their mothers,” he warns her. “We lose double the population of Ovvels in mothers every holiday season. Don’t be fooled by the grieving. The more ostentatious the display of mourning, the more dubious the loss.”
“I won’t do any talking at all.”
“Probably wise. For now, go sweep the veranda.” He gives her a broom.
She’s never held a broom before. You don’t need to sweep the dirt floor of a tent. To say that Elphie wields it awkwardly is an understatement. “In time it’ll come to feel like part of your arm,” says Unger, watching from the doorway. “But here comes a client; don’t be a fool and sweep leaves onto her!” Too late. The customer protests as a cloud of yellowed seedpods falls upon her veiled head. “Stand in the corner and keep a straight face; your smile is anything but genuine and it looks scary,” hisses Unger. “Good morning, friend Parwa’ani. A cup of tea?”
“Quite a monstrosity,” said this Parwa’ani, upon reaching the top of the stairs. She shakes off her veil, scattering the dust and leaves about so Elphie needed to go back to her work with the broom. “At which stall in the marketplace did you pick her up, Unger Bi’ix?”
“Very well, we’ll proceed directly to the display room,” he says. Elphie senses a touch of kindness, that he’s chosen not to gossip about how he met his new assistant. Or at least not in front of her. He is heard to mutter, however, in a dark aside, as the two adults disappear through the doorway, “One doesn’t quite know what to think, curiosity or curse?”
So their tentative arrangement, Elphie’s and Unger’s. If it collapses, as it probably has to, Elphie will just flee. Like the Ski’ioti. She is doing this for the family, such as she conceives family to be. She has no basis of comparison about how other families behave, living as she’s done in the wild, in the lone.
Her family isn’t sure it is grateful, because they don’t know if this Unger will make good on his promises. Maybe he’s just taking advantage of hapless labor. Frex grills Lei on the third night of Elphie’s tenure. “You’re certain that Elphie is in no danger? It’s not worth whatever information this Unger might turn up if he has unsavory designs on my daughter.”
“I’ve told you. He’s a married man,” replies Lei, with a sigh, because she’d prefer to be married again herself, and points it out to her lodgers frequently. “He has several families, in fact, in the outmarsh. Wives and children. He likes to father them, but he is well known for preferring business to parenting.”
“Perhaps I ought to have gone into business,” mumbles Frex.
“I’ll gouge his eyes out with a serrated grapefruit spoon if I hear of any funny business going on,” swears Nanny. “Elphie, you’re going to learn something with that Unger, but it better be decent. What is he having you do? I want the full day, moment by moment.”
“Nothing much. I gather there’s some holiday coming up, sort of like Lurlinemas but they call it by another name. Se’enth, or something like that. It has candles and special foods, and people give each other presents with wings on them. Weird. Unger says the custom probably comes from some old story about how the first Quadlings arrived here from far away across the deadly sands. The story says they must have flown because how else could they survive?”
“More superstitious nonsense, as sick and stuffy as the Lurline cycle,” snorts Frex. “Pay no attention to it. Se’enth. The idle appetite of the ill-informed.”
“Lurline is going to strike you dead for your snide commentaries,” singsongs Nanny. “One of these days, when she gets around to it.”
Elphie continues. “So Unger is teaching me how to sew. People show up with their little dollies made of dried vines and bones and whatnot, and it’s our job to cut out wings and fix them on. The more dead and lifeless the doll looks at the start, the more magical it becomes when it has wings of soft patterned cloth. I have to admit it, even though I hate the whole idea of dolls and toys.”
“I would like one,” says Nessarose. “A winged toy. Winged Ninnakins!”
“Pagan nonsense, temptation and distraction,” says her father.
“Let the little girl have her wish,” says Lei, who hasn’t yet commented about the Thropp family protocols. Frex winces at her but can’t risk agitating the landlady. He heaves himself off for a walk around the town, stewing. So far his attempts to rally a thin congregation have proved fruitless.
“I want a doll, too,” says Shell. “Then I could kill it over and over and it wouldn’t die, because it was already dead.”
“You’re a sick bunch. I worry about the whole lot of you,” says Nanny. “Elphie, if you’re learning to cut out wings and sew them together, make me an extra-large pair, would you. Out of your mother’s morning gown, that would be fitting, as it’s her behavior that landed me here in the first place. I have half a mind to lift myself out of this muckland and take my retirement back at Colwen Grounds. Meaning no disrespect,” she adds, nodding at Lei and pursing her lips in an attempt at a conciliatory moue. “A very nice muckland it is, too, none better.”