By the fourth day her father tells her she’ll have to stop by Unger’s shop and inform him that she can no longer work there. She’s needed at the camp meeting site, which the officers of the girls’ lodge have allowed Frex to continue to use—it gives their establishment a slight boost among the competition. A glamour. Elphie isn’t delighted to be enchained in devotions, but what can she do? The Thropps have to eat, and eventually to pay some back rent to Lei, as they’re already in arrears.
In the later afternoon, she makes her way to Unger’s emporium, climbs the stairs in that ridiculous heavy skirt. She looks to see if the Dwarf Bears are visible, but then, they had told her they rarely approach the floating gardens except at high noon. She squares her shoulders and ducks her head through the baffle of buttons strung to keep flies out of the doorway. “I know you’re here or the door would be closed.”
Unger comes out from the back room. “What a monstrosity,” he says, regarding her garb. “So after your unsanctioned holiday break you come crawling back. Or should I say ‘swishing’?”
“My father tells me I have to break this off. We must be paid up by now, with three or four of mother’s dresses handed over, and all my time spent measuring, and, um, cutting, and sweeping, and making all those wings.”
Unger nods. “I knew it was too good to last. There’s so much more I could teach you. I suppose, yes, the dresses with their novel patterns—we got a lot of holiday wings out of them. All the rage. Killed the competition. So, thank you. I agree: as to the cost of my researching for that Turtle Heart, you’re paid up. Much good may it do you.”
“So where are his people? You going to tell us?”
“Let me finish. As to underwriting the cost of replacing the shattered glass, your hours spent here may just about cover that. I haven’t done the sums yet. Even if”—he raises his hand—“even if you insist that I can’t prove someone in your party did it. I can’t prove they did and you can’t prove they didn’t. We’re square, or near enough to make no difference. So consider any balance still owed me as a gift from me to you. But, my girl, what a sorry figure you cut there, in that lumpy garment. Turn around. Dreadful. Look at that roll of wodge at your waist. Inelegant. Regrettable. It does you no good. It doesn’t become you at all.”
“It better not become me. It’s a frock for—um, for a siren, I guess.” Elphie grimaces; what can she do?
“Take it off. To thank you for reviving my custom these past few weeks, I’ll run you up a revision. You’ve been quite the draw, you know. Everyone wanted to come and have a look at you close up, back before you decided to parade yourself as a—what would you call it?—a summoner? A saint? A holy tease?”
“Please!” she says, knowing just enough to be offended on behalf of her father, though she hardly cares a whittle about what Unger might be implying about her.
“Take it off, I said. I’ll cut that heavy carpet-cloth into strips and chevron them into a skirt of much lighter muslin. It’ll be half the weight, or less, and tailored to your actual hips instead of to those of your poor mother. Take it off, I insist; give it over. It won’t be long. If I can’t finish it this afternoon, you can pick it up tomorrow.”
“But I’m not decent underneath!”
“Oh, preserve me, I’d thought you might have better sense. You’ve always seemed a freer creature than your upright father. But never mind, I suppose people would talk. Wait.” He disappears, returning with a simple shift of bleached white linen, light as gauze, just thick enough to be mostly modest. “You’ve seen these. I keep them for clients who come in needing emergency repair on ceremonial robes they haven’t looked at since the last funeral. Change behind the screen and hand over that suit of armor you call a devotional garment.”
She does as she is bade, stepping out in her bare green feet to lay the heavy pleated gown of her mother’s into Unger’s arms. He accepts it as a father receives the corpse of his son, fallen in battle. But when his eyes travel up to Elphie, he flushes. “Oh, you,” he says simply. “White suits you. I suppose you’ve never had reason to discover this.”
She sticks her tongue out at him. “I’m not interested in being appealing.”
“You make that very clear. Still, once in a rare while, you can’t help it. Oh, my, Elphie, what are we going to do with you?”
That’s all that passes between them on the subject. He returns to the back room and she hears the sound of scissors amputating her mother’s dress. “As long as you’re here, please tie up the remaining winged figments on the cord above the porch rail,” he calls. “The season is over, but we might still move some product at a deep discount. Next year will require new designs. Fashion is fickle. As is proven by this heartache of a Munchkinlander gown. What were they thinking? Was your mother a lunatic by any chance?”
She strings up a dozen and a half pairs of bird wings and has ten more to go before she has a chance to look down. The Pari’isi boy is at the foot of the raked steps to the emporium, lounging about with a fatherly smirk on his face and a cigarette between his fingers. “Unger’s occupied,” says Elphie. “He’s got a rush job. You’d better go away.”
“Oh, I have no business with him,” says the lad. “I was passing by and I spotted your silhouette, and now I’m wondering if you’re going to sing the glories of Unger’s overstock. The Skylark of Ovvels, they’re calling you. I’d think the Vulture of Ovvels might be more to the point, but vultures don’t sing.”
Elphie is decent, but her robe is light and blows about her in buffets of white, and her green arms and shins and feet made her feel nakedly on display compared to her usual cloak of hooded drabbery, essential in the event of a sudden downpour. “Go strangle yourself with a pearl choker,” she snaps. The boy laughs and slips a handful of something from his shoulder pouch and begins to lob small items, one at a time, in her direction. She has to duck, to dodge. Vegetable pearls, those precious items, and he’s squandering them to make her lunge about! More fool him, she thinks, I’m not going to throw them back to him. He can come up here and get them if he wants them. Otherwise, I’m keeping them.
But she guesses that he is teasing her for a gain; he likes the way she moves in her loose white shift, angled and cavorting, her dark hair spinning. She isn’t sure how she feels about this. “Stop or I’ll call Unger Bi’ix,” she says.
“I am glad you’re here, because I’m not permitted to go to that camp revival meeting your father has launched. Can you sing for me, at least? Everyone says you’re weirdly compelling.”
“I’m just weird. It’s my father who is compelling.” She’s nearly done, working hastily and sloppily. “Whatever do you want here? I have business to see to.”
“Just you come down, and I’ll whisper you what I want.”
She makes a show of scooping up the pearls. She tosses precisely one down and hits him on the head, to show him she can, and then carries the rest back into the shop. She deposits them upon the cutting table. “There,” she says to Unger. “That ought to cover the balance of whatever it is we still owe you for the window. I don’t want to take any gifts from you, thank you all the same.”
He looks up at her shrewdly. “Where did you come by these, if I may ask?”
“They’re a kind of donation,” she tells him. “I don’t wear jewelry. And I don’t wear pretty white gowns. I’m going to go wait behind the screen till you’re done.”
“I may not be done by dusk, if other clients come to interrupt the job.”
“Business is slack, you said. And I’ll shut the door. If someone knocks, I can call through that you’re engaged.”
“That would do my reputation no good, the door closed with a young maiden on this side of it, and me ‘engaged.’”
“Then you better work fast.”
And so he does. By trade a merchant and not a fabricateur, his skills are nonetheless sure after decades of emergency assistance. The concoction he assembles is simple. A charcoal grey-black muslin, featuring a high neck and mutton sleeves gathered below the elbow; the shift falls loosely from shoulder to calf. Without the roll of excess fabric around Elphie’s waist, the line is simple and draws no attention to her nascent womanly attributes, or lack of them. From the hips down, just a little flare, and this comes from the five or six segments of her mother’s russet gown inset like darts from hem to hip. No pleating, no furbelows. For the first time Elphie recognizes that while her mother’s gowns had all meant something—they’d meant blossoms, they’d meant birds and patterns of leaves, they’d been a catalog of something other than skirt material—the taste of Quadlings doesn’t favor representation. These severed panels from her mother’s dress are now largely illegible. Just color and form, not flowers. “I like it better like this,” she says, putting her face to it.
“It’s not as attractive as the simple white—”
“It’ll suit me fine,” she says firmly. “So, are we tallied out now? Is this good-bye?”
“Not quite,” he replies. “You and your father still need to make the arrangements about the replacement of the glass. I will pay for it, now you’ve made good on the family debt, but you’ll have to place the order. Quadlings are deft at glassblowing, though a piece this size takes a real master of the craft. I’ll use a piece of cloth to mark out the dimensions, and I’ll tell you where to find the tradesman. I’m pretty certain that he can tell you what he knows about Turtle Heart. Both contracts fulfilled on one afternoon. Once you manage that, our business arrangement is terminated.”
“You won’t come with me?”
“Wouldn’t be seemly. You need your father or another chaperone—perhaps that Nanny. And, Elphie?”
He has scarcely used her name before. “Yes—Unger?” She either, his.
“I don’t know where your life will go from here. Maybe you will live it out here in Ovvels. But I hope not.”
“Thank you, same to you.” She is grinning at him. “Why not, though?”
“Ovvels has nothing to offer you. You’re a sharp child. You ought to strengthen your reading. Your mind is curious and your attention is keen. You need something that hasn’t been provided you yet. It’s called an education.”
“Ha,” she says to that, “not bloody likely.”
“I mean it,” he tells her. “You’re just like a vegetable pearl. Harvested in muck, just waiting for the gleam and polish. Listen, there are places in Oz that could give you something more than your father can, or I can. But to be ready, you need more math, more science. Some children do prep schools, but I think you—you can pick things up in a hiccup.”
“In a hiccup.”
“Meaning: As you go along. Now, I don’t want to get your hopes up. But you have good breeding, if such a thing counts at all. You’re a clever girl. Don’t squander it.”
“When I grow old enough, I want to go live with the Dwarf Bears,” she says.
“Not our local brigands? No chance of that. They were chased off a few days ago.”
Elphie stiffens. “I’ll find them.”
“You won’t,” he says with certainty. “They won’t be back, Elphie.”
“But—but why?”
He hesitates. “Oh, I can’t say, what do I know of the mind of a Dwarf Bear? They were seen to be coming too near the city. Who knows why. They can be hell on the local agriculture, you know. They eat everything, and they have no respect for private property. There’s some chatter that Lei Leila’ani was passing about that the Ski’ioti threatened your poor sister and tried to drown her.”
Unger sees the stricken look on the face of his assistant. He softens his tone. “Or maybe the creatures heard tell that you were singing in the crowd, and they wanted to catch an earful, too. And came too close. Don’t take me seriously, Elphie, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do know that they’re removed from the environs, securely and permanently. Where they’ve gone, no one from Ovvels can further threaten them.”
She is afraid perhaps he does know exactly what he is talking about. Neri-neri. Lollo-lollo.
“Prepare the pattern for the window glass,” she says crisply. “Can you have someone deliver it to Lei’s house with instructions on how we can find your glassblower colleague? I’ll do that much for you and no more.”
“Well, don’t forget. The glassblower’s clan may be able to identify your Turtle Heart’s particular origins. Chelo’ona, that’s the name of origin, right? Your father mentioned that the wandering prophet had been a glassblower. I haven’t been idle, you know. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. This may be the lead you are looking for.”
Yes, beneath the last of her mother’s dresses in that trunk lies that oval looking-glass of sorts, which Nanny said was blown by Turtle Heart and given to Melena as a present.
In her cut-down robe Elphie all but throws the white shift at Unger. “I’ll say good-bye now. Perhaps our paths will cross in the trees or on the grounds. But I don’t want to live in Ovvels if the people here are willing to abuse those Dwarf Bears. I want someplace better than this.”
“Good luck at finding such a place,” he says, hurt by her brusqueness. “Let me know if you manage to locate it. Or maybe you’ll have to establish a preserve of your own for the protection of the hunted. Elphie, you’re looking stony. Remember what I said. An education, Miss Elphaba Thropp. Get yourself an education, and use some of what you have going on inside that vital spirit of yours.”
“I’ve never liked you,” she says.
“The feeling has been exactly mutual. From the moment I saw you.”
Their arms ring round each other, her green cheek against his shoulder blade, his breath upon her hair.