Frex is dubious about Elphie’s gussied-up garment. So much less ponderous, it all but provokes Elphie to whisk and pivot. “What’s wrong with that? Damn near the first thing she’s ever had that fits her,” snaps Nanny. “Nearly frisky.”
“That’s what I don’t like about it.” Frex turns to his daughter. “Not a moment too soon, I see, remanding you to the service of the mission. Just in time. I’ve always had my doubts about that clothier.”
“Oh really, Father? Did you? And yet you allowed me to work for him to feed the family.” Ooh, how cold she can be, a new accomplishment! Disarmingly cutting.
“Don’t be snarky. I asked around, I checked Unger out, to make sure you’d be safe. And you were, weren’t you?”
She hates to give him the point, but she can’t lie. She nods.
“Good. Though now I’ve seen him doll you up a little, I wonder if my earlier apprehensions were justified. Still, as long as there’s been no harm done. Nick of time extraction from that den of glamour, but no matter. We’ll move on, making ourselves better through devotion. As all right-thinking people do.”
Wearing this renovated outfit to her job of mission hostess and precentor, Elphie finds herself less precisely under her father’s command. Even as she does his bidding. He’s uncertain of the frock—so she likes it. She practices whirling on the ball of one foot, to make it flair and sail.
“It’s the get-up of someone who has some get-up-and-go,” murmurs Nanny, in a tone of mixed approval, envy, and skepticism.
One day Lei comes back from her daily rounds with a parcel of rough-cut fabric under her arm. It’s been given her by Unger, for delivery to Frex. She suspects that Frex ordered it for a vestment, hoping to solemnize Elphie with something less show-offy. “I can cut out a pattern and run up a more suitable shift, that’s what mothers do,” promises Lei. But upon examination of the piece, Elphie explains why Unger had sent it home. “We still have to place the order for the glass that got mysteriously shattered the day I approached Unger. That was part of the deal of my employment. It’s the unfulfilled part of the job.”
When Frex arrives home, he insists that Elphie need have nothing more to do with Unger and his operations. “We promised,” insists Elphie. She reminds her father this may also be the way to locate Turtle Heart’s tribe at last. He was a glassblower originally, too. “It’s a simple exchange. We’ll see what we can learn. And we gave our word, Father. Even if no one has yet claimed responsibility for that broken window.”
“Glass can shatter under its own weight,” her father insists.
“So can hearts,” adds Lei. She’s so off the subject, no one responds to her comment.
Lei reads aloud Unger’s instructions on how to find the glassblower’s foundry. A place called Samani, a morning’s trek to the north, beyond the lazy hills where Elphie had rendezvoused with the Dwarf Bears. “Fine,” says Elphie. “I’ll go and come back in one day.” Maybe Elphie will yet see the Ski’ioti, catch up with what has happened to them. Maybe they are all right—maybe they didn’t—
“I forbid you to even think of it. I’ll go.” But her father needs to troubleshoot a challenge from the town elders about his gathering a congregation in a public area. Frex has to argue the defense and win permission. It could take several days of meetings with different committees and jurisdictive officials.
Nonetheless, he won’t let Elphie wander off to Samani on her own. Out of the question.
Nanny can’t chaperone. She daren’t leave Shell to run wild in Ovvels. The stroppy kid is enjoying a stage of being ungovernable.
Not to mention Nessa—never to mention Nessa.
Elphie wants only to strike out. At once. She isn’t sure why. Looking for Turtle Heart is the least of it; that’s her father’s obsession. She’s going itchy in the limbs. The world of Ovvels has become cramped. Parochial. She can tolerate mission singing but she feels a fraud; real devotion escapes her. She misses Unger’s shop, but there’s no going back. And she still hopes to find out what has happened to Neri-neri and Lollo-lollo. If she can.
So Elphie strategizes. She doesn’t give her father any rest. She declares a headache. She is unsteady, she is unable to sing in public— Maybe if she gets a change of scenery? Some exercise? They could come up with a plan?
“A headache?” Nanny strokes her jaw. “How time flies. I’ll get the cloths ready.”
Since Frex won’t think of allowing any other male to escort Elphie out of town, the matter remains at an impasse until, improbably, their landlady steps up. Lei Leila’ani, a helpful hand to the nation. “I know Samani,” she says gamely, “I once had a cousin there. I’ll bring Elphie to finish the deal. Happy to.”
“Why doesn’t Unger just go and order his glass for himself?” grouses Frex.
“That’s where one of his wives lives, and their children,” replies Lei, shrugging. “Families. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. But you can try. I have been trying for some time. I prefer living with a family.” Nanny rolls her eyes.
“Besides,” says Elphie, “Unger has no business with Turtle Heart’s people. That’s our project, not his.”
So the landlady and Elphie set out the next morning with the cloth template. Nessa, sore at being left behind, starts to shriek. It takes Elphie a moment to realize Nessa is mocking her sister’s singing. A voice can be such a weapon.
“Mercy,” says Lei Leila’ani, “what a widow of slender means has to put up with. Has your sister always been combative?”
“She’d much rather be the one to advertise for the Unnamed God,” replies Elphie. “And she can have the job as far as I’m concerned.”
“Not ready, to hear her have go at it. She wouldn’t attract converts; she’d drive them away.”
Quickly enough they’ve escaped the miracle of Ovvels, that timbered human beehive. The world of fresh breeze, of cedar trees and higher, drier ground, seems of a different nation entirely. Rarely on her own with Lei, Elphie has been readying for this. She wants to sniff out the truth about her landlady’s possible part in spreading a rumor against the Ski’ioti. But she can’t risk setting Lei against her this early in the trip. Maybe Elphie will find evidence that Lollo-lollo and Neri-neri are still nearby. If so, she can stop fretting about their having been run off. Retire suspicions about Lei.
She tries to keep an open mind. Lei doesn’t seem malevolent, just—just malcontent. Elphie needs to step gingerly. Though she wants to ask Lei if she’s ever had any congress with talking Animals, Elphie can’t think of a way to frame the question without sounding nosy or suggestive. Lei may be a vicious gossip, but she’s a humble woman and a proud one. Also, her pace heading uphill belies her confessions of female frailty. She’s one hearty old hen.
When they’ve reached the crown of the hill, and Elphie is glancing about for the Dwarf Bears— for food detritus or scat, for crushed undergrowth that might suggest a sleeping den—Lei is the one to leap with advantage into the silence. Point-blank she asks Elphie about her mother. “Do you remember her at all?”
“Of course I do,” says Elphie so abruptly that Lei is halted for a moment or two, giving Elphie a moment to gather her thoughts.
They trudge on among the noble cedars. No Dwarf Bears in evidence, or any creature more substantial than an overweight squirrel. Only bugs and birds and hidden creatures scurrying left and right into the underbrush. Nothing to distract Elphie from the ambush of memory. They start down the other side of the bluff, leaving Ovvels out of sight or sound.
It’s been five years since her mother passed away. More than a third of Elphie’s life so far.
The mother in her mind is unreliable, an occasional twist of vowel sounds, spoken as if from another tent in the dark. She’s impossible to picture. Is this normal, to forget how your mother looked?
But should Elphie blame herself for this vacancy? Melena had had little time for her older daughter. She’d had to take care of Nessarose because the need was so complete, the situation so desperate. Why should Elphie feel uneasy about anything? She was only a little kid when Nessa was born. It was none of Elphie’s affair. But she wonders now if she herself might be partly responsible for Nessa’s sadnesses. Somehow. Despite the offense of having been born green, Elphie is capable in ways Nessa isn’t. Both girls know it.
Elphie: a constant sliver in Nessa’s own foot that Nessa herself could never reach to extract.
For a while now, Elphie’s believed that her sister may have stolen her parents’ attention, but she also concedes that Nessa has also diverted scrutiny from Elphie. Allowed Elphie some liberty from her father’s abstracted calling and her mother’s too-casual oversight. So Elphie owes Nessa something, much as she hates to admit it. It comes into focus because now that Elphie’s voice has matured, she’s slid back in her father’s good book. And under his thumb.
To be fair to Melena, though, how could a mother have been expected to care for two damaged children at once? Nessa is a bottomless pit of need that no amount of shoveling can fill in. To use that word—love—which Elphie isn’t sure she really grasps—how could Melena have loved two daughters at once? How could anyone?
Oh, love. Even innocent and ignorant Elphie knows that at age thirteen she ought to be starting to apprehend the concept. Maybe her mother would have been able to teach her. Maybe Melena would have come into her own when Elphie reached the yucky age and needed to know. But Elphie comprehends little of the matter. As Nanny tells it, love is something silly, lacy, a charm made of spun sugar and vegetable pearls. Useful for nothing but diversion. While to her father, love is a mandate shackling the devout to their cloudy creator, the Unnamed God. More an obligation, like a debt to be repaid, than a felt experience.
No, love has little to do with what Elphie grasps of family life. A different term is needed for that household dynamic. Not love but—obligatory accommodation?
Elphie doesn’t harbor these thoughts in anything resembling sentences, propositions, ripostes. She merely thinks: Melena—love—mothering—family—huh? But something seeps and stings through Elphie’s thinking as she and Lei trudge on. Quiet minutes lengthen, and lengthen further.
Melena. Elphie can’t even picture her. Still, for the sliveriest of instants Elphie remembers the warm odor of her mother’s clean hair. A smell of lavender and the faintest bite of sweat, with a tang of warm cabbage to it. Elphie’s eyes start to sting. She knows from previous experiences that tears will burn her skin, so she fists them away and begins to swear softly, in anger, at her mother. If only to keep tender thoughts at bay.
“I guess you probably don’t remember much about her,” says Lei.
“No, why should I, she’s dead.”
“But during the year of obsequy, others will have shared their memories, and built up your own, even if they are secondhand. Do they not help?”
Elphie doesn’t know what Lei means. The older woman explains that tradition requires the community to gather with the bereaved once a week until the first-year anniversary of the death. Together, family and neighbors recount memories and pose questions and—it seems—even air grudges and take umbrages. “Don’t you see? Otherwise the dead become inert. Stamped in tin or carved in hard mahogany,” says Lei. “To hold a person as she was in the final week or month of death, that isn’t fair—not to the spirit of the person, not to you. Didn’t your father follow the usual practice?”
“I don’t think that’s his tradition,” says Elphie.
“Well, I wasn’t sure if it was my place to order a pair of wings for the holiday, but it didn’t escape me that no one has brought out a spirit totem for her. You don’t carry her with you.” The tone was sad. “Where is her resting place?”
“I don’t remember what happened to—to the remains. I think we tidied up and we moved out of there, fast. Leaving the sense of it behind. The sadness.”
Leaving behind even the look of the woman. The unseeable mother.
“Also leaving behind the healing,” says Lei. She seems to be mulling something over. Maybe Frex is losing ground as a potential second husband, if only because, should Lei predecease him, he might consign her to a fate of neglect in afterlife.
What happens if you refuse to live in sadness, Elphie wonders—and this is actually a full question, asked of herself in her mind, grammatically. The only problem is she doesn’t really know to whom the “you” refers. Is she thinking of Quadlings, whose concepts of mortality are riddles and secrets to her? Or of her father, who has three motherless children to see to? Or even herself? What happens if I refuse to live in sadness?
Before she can worry this out any further, they are descending a rocky slope into the settlement that Lei confirms is the camp of the glassblowers.