Twice Elphie climbs the knoll where she last met the Ski’ioti. She calls their names as she remembers them, though maybe her pronunciation is feeble. “Lollo-lollo? Neri-neri!” But she doesn’t holler. It’s a trick, trying cautiously to summon fugitives out of hiding. Using an aerated whisper-bellow. If she opened up her lungs she could command the attention of half the town below, you better believe it. But what good would that do the Ski’ioti?
So maybe they’re here, still, but aren’t persuaded to show themselves again. They’ve taken from Elphie all that they want to know. They have no obligation to her. What is she looking for? Friendship? What would she know of friendship? She hardly understands the word.
Both times she heads back to town. Both times she is late for work, and Unger has sharp words for her. Once more and the deal is off.
The Ski’ioti will find me when they feel like it, she concludes, turning her attention to her chores.
Elphie learns to manage scissors and she learns to handle a needle. She learns to stitch. She bloods her hands. Day by day something new, until after some days in a row she has a routine. Too much of a routine, maybe. She remains eager to conjure up the Ski’ioti and figure out more of—more of something. What is it? She doesn’t know.
The not knowing what she needs to learn is part of the excitement.
But she masters punctuality, at least. Daily she’s the first to arrive. She unlocks the door with a key stored under a stone idol of some sort, a kind of lady with a fish-tail in place of legs. She takes out the broom and sweeps the veranda. Yes, the broom has become more subservient, as Unger predicated. Then Elphie attends to the floors of the salon and the workroom.
For Unger’s repair work, to which he turns his attentions when the salon is quiet, she lays out the threads in a color sequence of a rainbow, more or less, though the black and silver and gold and bronze confuse her. And so does pink—it seems unrelated to red no matter what Unger keeps telling her. White is always at the far left, so she doesn’t have to think about it. Black doesn’t seem like the opposite of white, but more like a cousin. Unger despairs of her.
The night before, Unger has pulled forward the fabrics he expects they will need the next day. In the mornings, Elphie hoists these bolts of self-confident color on her thin shoulder, one by one, and carries them from the back room to the front. She slots them into a set of rococo brackets built into the wall. Some people get drunk on proximity to prettiness—a roll of woven red roses sloping down over this sheer, saturated blue piqué!—but that sort of thrill is lost on Elphie. She listens to the birds in the trees outside the wide oval window frame, still waiting its replacement glass. Before Unger arrives, Elphie pulls up the sheer cloth drapery so she can see the birds, too. She hopes they will fly in. She’s supposed to be approximating their wings, after all. Once in a while the birds oblige her, but they dirty the furniture as they flutter about, looking for escape, and Unger is cross at their droppings.
Elphie brings forward the scissors and the marking wheel and the tapes for measuring. She puts them on a brass tray in the right order. She retrieves the shallow bowl filled with bits of white chalk that Unger uses to mark lengths on the cloth. On a side table that rolls on little iron wheels she lays out upward of fifteen differently sized templates used for the cutting of wings. Woven from reeds, they fray easily. On some mornings she melts the bottom of a candle, and while it is still warm and malleable she drips the ivory beeswax along the wing-edges, sealing them. Extending the useful life of the patterns.
Her movements make her feel prissy, but she doesn’t care. Unger is particular. She squares paper slips for billing, perching a small brass monkey atop them to keep them from blowing away. Readies the quill pen, plops down next to it a bottle of ruby ink with a ruby glass stopper. Everything is elegant, as if made for a palace, but this is a shop, that’s all. She doesn’t quite understand the atmospherics of business, but she realizes that tone is important, somehow.
Once the shop opens, she sticks to Unger’s elbow, responding to his monosyllabic requirements. When clients come, she mostly keeps her mouth shut. Here in this built environment Elphie feels as if she stands out more. So she learns to train her eyes to her task, not out of propriety but because she really doesn’t want to engage anyone who is busy ignoring her anyway.
When the shop is empty of customers, Unger brings her tea, supervises her output, criticizes her sloppy needle skills, and makes her rip out inept work, which he calls lazy. But she can’t criticize him as taking advantage of her in any way. He’s respectable and he keeps custody of his own curiosity, not asking her nosy questions the way Lei sometimes does. (Lei drinks a little in the evenings.)
Unger also snips and stitches as hard as Elphie does, or harder, sometimes sitting across the work bench from her. He’s not a young man—older than her father, she guesses. His eyes aren’t keen, and the close work is vexing, but he keeps to it. He teaches Elphie the necessary elegance of the tight stitch. He whoofs and sighs as he gets up to lumber to the front of the showroom whenever a client comes in. His customers buy or sell fabric, or they order wings or fittings or, once in a while, clothes—though that is infrequent. The citizens of Ovvels have little time for pretty outfits that will only get rained on and stained by mud and refuse.
Unger works his clients over with charm and a skill at salesmanship that Elphie admires without quite figuring out how it works. She can’t say he’s unctuous or insincere, but nor does he seem personable. The calibration of his attention upon a customer shifts by the sentence, by the moment, as the person hesitates before plunking down cash and making a deal.
One afternoon Elphie has pricked her fingers a bit too often. She sits sucking two of her fingers to avoid dropping blood on the sample before her, a stretch of creamy silk blotted with drowsy fuchsia flowers. Unger has fetched a small stone vial of salve. This helps seal the wound, but her fingers need binding in cotton so the grease of the ointment doesn’t do damage to the fabric. Elphie lets him apply the unguent to her fingertips. She feels a sudden urge to weep, and she doesn’t know why. His touch is so—so concerned. As soon as she can do so without being rude, she yanks her hand away and says to him, “Where are all the boys in this town?”
He’s entirely unfazed by the question. “Surely Goodwidow Lei has told you all about that. As soon as boys reach the age of seven, they’re brought out to the eastern marshes, two days journey from here, to harvest vegetable pearls. They can work for ten to fifteen years before developing the crud-lung. It’s the foundation of our economy, not just in Ovvels but all over this part of Oz. The market is bottomless, but sometimes the marsh seems so, too. Only boys can drop that low in the water. Their body weight is optimal—less resistance because less bulk—and their athletic suppleness a natural advantage. So you’re quite right. The town has its share of girls and young women, who after a certain age often live in residential lodges until marriage. But maidens have to wait until the boys age out of the vegetable pearl business. And those maidens take what they can get, snap up the next available boy quick as they can. The crud-lung sometimes means an early death, and young brides want as much married life as they can curry. You’ll have realized that Goodwidow Lei is not the only single woman running a household on her own. It’s more common than not.”
“You avoided crud-lung.”
“I avoid gossip in general, and so should you. But if you’re looking for some green boy here to go around with, I’m afraid you’re going to be sorely disappointed. We don’t seem to carry much in the way of green boys.”
“I’m not waiting for that. Look, I hear someone on the steps.”
Unger gets up and walks out to be convivial. There’s no one on the steps. He lets Elphie return to her work and allows the subject to sink into the afternoon languor. However, before closing, he takes from a locked drawer a few vegetable pearls and rolls them into the brass incense stand. They look like albino peas, one as large as a thumb tip, others with a nacreous pink blush, or ivory, or a faint lemon green. All of them subtle, pale, and reflective. Apparently vegetable pearls harden as they age, but when first harvested they can be pierced with a needle, which allows for stringing. Jewelry, fabric ornamentation, who knows what. Unger uses them for trim when clients bring out the right sort of wallet.
Elphie picks up a few and looks at them, to be polite. The appeal of beauty escapes her, mostly. He is careful to lock them away as soon as she is done. No word passes between them about it.
She’s begun to stay through the noontime meal and on toward dusk. At home that night, she complains of her work, of her bloody thumbs. Nanny coos and her father ignores her and Shell ignores her, but Nessa says, “I wish I could work there, too. Elphie, will you bring me? I could do something useful, surely?”
“Like what? Bite the threads at the end of a patch job?”
“You’re horrid. I could sit and be attractive and talk to customers while they’re waiting for you to finish up. You can’t be very engaging, with your tongue, and I doubt you’re very deft.”
“Maybe not, but I can pick up any thread that I drop.”
Elphie’s gone too far, out of exhaustion and maybe pride. Nessa mutters, “What I wouldn’t give to thread a needle and blood my fingers.” So Elphie doesn’t complain again, or not in front of her sister, anyway.