But someone who needs to be healthy sometimes can find a way. Without yet admitting that there’s been much deprivation in her life, except in the realm of porcelain tea sets, Elphie inches forward to supply for herself what she requires.
One afternoon a few weeks later, Elphie tells her father she’s going to slip away from the service after the first anthem. He’ll have to close out the program without music. Why, he asks her. She makes a face meaning to imply: female moments we don’t generally discuss with our father. He catches her drift and pats her hand, and that’s that.
When the gathering song is done, the congregation plunks itself upon the ground, readying for mild admonishment, which is oddly thrilling to this peaceable people. Elphie steals off, intending to circle around the lodge so the congregation doesn’t see her leaving. She passes the classrooms of the younger children. Before one of the windows now sits Nessarose with a scarily keen expression on her face, listening. Lei, bored out of her skull, lurks to one side, doing cunning little handicrafts with reeds. Elphie ignores them both, and hums to block out the sound of instruction threading across windowsills and thresholds.
Forensic curiosity about human behavior doesn’t come naturally to Elphie. She’s far more interested in Animals and what they know that she doesn’t, or can’t. It rarely occurs to her that she could pose the same questions about the nature of her sister or brother. Nessa and Shell are mere appurtenances, growths in the fabric of her life, so common as to be invisible. Yet stalking up the slope to the cedar grove, Elphie almost wonders about who squirmy little Shell really is, and whether he can even tell the difference between lying or not. Maybe nobody can. Maybe she can’t either.
It doesn’t go far, this line of enquiry, but here she is, scrambling up the knoll a third time—on the hopes that, whether he intended to or not, Shell is telling the truth about the Dwarf Bears maybe still lurking about. Is she being appalling, a busybody, a plague to the fugitive creatures? Perhaps they prefer to be disappeared. Or maybe they have fled from taunting boys or threatened men. Or maybe indeed they have been killed. She may never know. (She will never know.)
However, under a stand of cedars not far from where she had her one treasured interview with Lollo-lollo and Neri-neri, she finds not the pair of Ski’ioti but that Pari’isi boy, the one with the vegetable pearl hanging from an earlobe. He is sitting on a blanket of some sort and he has a book open on the ground in front of him. He has heard her approach before she has seen him. His gaze upon her is open, amused, and defensive.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” she says, her hands on her hips, as if this is her hill.
“I didn’t think I was waiting for you, but perhaps I was.”
“I’m Elphie.”
“I know who you are. Why are you bothering me when I’ve stolen away to be able to read in peace?”
“I said, ‘I’m Elphie.’ Aren’t you supposed to tell me who you are next? Isn’t that how it goes?”
He laughs. “If we’re following the script. Wasn’t sure you were that sort. All right. I’m Pari’isi To’or. What are you doing away from your holy post?”
She doesn’t bother to answer. She doesn’t want to share her concerns about the Dwarf Bears, nor to give away to this unknown threat of a lad the possibility, however slim, that the Bears are dug in somewhere. She won’t blow their cover. This goofy fellow is here by coincidence, that destiny manager. “What are you reading?” she asks, to change the subject.
“A polemic on class and status, if you must know.”
“Well, I have no class and no status, so I can’t comment. What is a polemic?”
“An overheated argument that might have some merit anyway, if you can bear to read through the fire of its feeling.”
She would like him to go away so she can stand and holler a hullo into the foliage. “Do Animals have class and status?” she asks, despite herself.
“Excuse me. I am reading here. Quietly. Not convening a discussion group.”
“Too bad.” Just to be horrid, just for some reason she can’t identify, she sits down on the ground. Not on his blanket, but near enough. “Here you are. I’ve seen you lurking around the back of the congregation sometimes. Are you seeking a conversion?”
“No. I don’t want that. Nor am I allowed. My uncle wouldn’t hear of it. Class and status. He is the chancellor, Pari’isi Menga’al.”
“Big deal. The minister is my father. If you’re not ripe for swaying toward unionism, why do you keep showing up?”
“I like to hear you sing.” He looks directly at her as he says this, unblinkered and brave; she nearly flinches at the rude honesty of it. She can’t think of a snappy reply. Maybe he takes pity. He continues, “You were doing more of it at first, but then you seemed to disappear for large segments of the morning.”
“I was, um, auditing some lessons. Until that fell apart.”
“You miss it. You have a hungry look on your face.”
“You seem to have been studying me. That’s a bit creepy, did you know that?”
He shrugs. “I’m hungry, too. That’s why I’m reading about class and status rather than following my uncle around on council business, which is boring.”
He is her age or maybe older. It’s hard to tell. He knows things she doesn’t, and he isn’t timid around her. Maybe he’s only casual and openminded when he’s escaped his kind. The class and status of it all. He lights a cigarette.
She makes an analogy with her father who, in the damp outback all his working life, is perhaps more liberated than if he had a country parish back in Munchkinland. Something to be said for making one’s self a place apart. This is a conceptual leap for her, comparing one person’s experience with another’s. She feels dizzy.
“Tell me something about what you’re reading, and something more about what you think about it.”
They linger in the shade of cedars for half the morning. By the time she stands up, she has abandoned the hope of scaring the Ski’ioti out of hiding. Her mind has moved on to an arrangement she’s cobbled together with this boy-man.
A kind of clumsy, tentative contract in which neither knows quite who is paying what and who is receiving what. Nor even why, except to talk it through is the first exercise, and they have both passed it.
If Elphie can insist on having independent hours between the start of morning meeting and its conclusion, a seminar of two people will convene here, in the cedar grove, on the hill overlooking the lagoon and its watery allotments, with the rice terraces rising to one side and the puzzlepiece town of Ovvels below. If one of them can’t make it, the other won’t take offense or worry. That’s the only condition. They will see what is what.
And they do see, though whether either of them can name what they are seeing is uncertain. For the next season or two, though seasons in the marshworld scarcely change from month to month, Elphie Thropp and Pari’isi To’or sequester themselves here. They work on anything that he can teach and she can learn. He has had his own tutor at home, sometimes. He has a good keen mind and isn’t bad at explaining stuff. She soaks it up.
She doesn’t think of him as a person, quite, but more as a willing spigot. She’s bullied him into helping her because he’s ashamed of his prurience about her. But very quickly all that falls away. She hardly notices him as a form, as a male, as a boy verging toward manhood. He’s a convenience.
Only later in her life, when she thinks back to this time (and such reflections don’t happen often, she hasn’t time for reflection), does she wonder why Pari’isi To’or had helped her at all. When at first, at Unger Bi’ix’s, he had seemed to mock her, even to be disgusted. Of course, from time to time, curiosity can overwhelm revulsion, and maybe that’s his game. There’s certainly no sense of a flicker of interest romantically, not that she can read at the time, nor discern later on, looking back. She hasn’t been especially enticing. (Ha!) Bewitching? Forget it. She’s only a rubbishy thing, a scalawag scholar if she can even call herself a scholar, grasping for what he can teach her.
But when she comes into a more adult apprehension about mortality—say, when Nessarose dies—Elphaba sees that in the law of magnifying probability, death becomes more inevitable with every passing day lived. The fewer days you have left, the more crucial it is you spend them usefully. Blow something up before you get blown up. Even if it is just ignorance—blow up ignorance, blow it up in its own face.
So finally she assembles the few things she knows about that kid (he isn’t all that much older than she is, after all), Pari’isi To’or. She hasn’t been interested in him per se. She’s greedy for learning, a motherless wolf cub who goes for the milk someone has left out, but who will never become a pet. When you’re dying of thirst, it’s the milk that calls you forward, not the hand that pours it.
Unlike his male peers, Pari’isi To’or is excused from the job of diving for vegetable pearls. It isn’t actually because he’s a few notches above, socially—connected to the people in power. (Though that probably doesn’t hurt.) The rotten part is that he suffers from some kind of lung ailment. The physician in Ovvels can detect no sound of air in To’or’s left lung, and in the right lung, too little. The consensus is that To’or doesn’t have a long life ahead of him. He’s excused from diving because he doesn’t sustain enough air in him to be competent at it. He’s excused most things because he’s nearer the end of his life, and he knows it, than people twice his age.
And so, Elphaba concludes when, later, she finally adds it up, To’or’s meeting her in the cedar grove and sharing the benefits of his better education isn’t puppy love or some sideways lunge at seduction. He’s too well-bred to demonstrate any attraction or, more likely, any sense of revulsion he might feel toward her. No—Pari’isi To’or wants to teach Elphaba something so that his short life will have delivered some compensation to the world when the time comes for him to leave it.
She doesn’t look at him. Maybe she’s been shy, maybe there’s been a little tension of affection between them. Later, she can’t be certain. What is he like? She will not be able to remember much. She will recall in keener detail a bobcat once spied in a mangrove swamp than she will this boy-cub. Is his hair of the more spongey, loose-curled type, or lank and straight? Is he thinner than the average Quadling boy? There are too few others of his age hanging about Ovvels, no one with which to compare him. He’s physically a little awkward, as if some belt of muscles around his rib cage isn’t flexible; he turns from the waist, not the shoulders. That’s about all she can admit to noticing.
Unger has taught Elphie to focus, with scissors and a ruler and with a precision of language that outlines the world more keenly that her father’s dogma ever could. The teachers at that school have filled in the background, dispelling the fog of ignorance with exercises in proper language usage, supplying names for the concepts of mathematics. Building the architecture.
Pari’isi To’or diverts from those approaches. For a young person, he manages somehow to teach her about stance—about considering that how you think of something colors what you are free to know about it.
Eventually they do talk about the Dwarf Bears. He has picked up that she is curious about Animal life, since it’s been hiding in plain sight from her all her days so far. He lets drop that there have been rumors about the Dwarf Bears, that someone said they’d pushed Nessa in the water in order to drown her, but that really the Ski’ioti were despised for plundering the floating gardens. Which are private. Or considered private by the humans who built them and tend them.
Rumors only. Maybe the Ski’ioti are safe. Elphie clams up at some of the implications of To’or’s analysis, but once the possible deed of murder is spoken in the open between Elphie and To’or, she drops the topic. It is unbearable to think about it. The Ski’ioti were here and now they’re not. She accepts this. She will live with a sense of bereavement about this for the rest of her childhood, and probably beyond. Though a curiosity to sort out the variables between Animal and human behavior—character—the absolute quality of being one thing or the other—is an appetite that has taken hold, and it will not quit her, ever.
She hasn’t registered whether or not To’or himself is offended about the supposed attack on the Animals. She sees only that he’s pointing out that because her stance of curiosity about the Dwarf Bears has gotten the better of her, she’s learned more about them than anyone else in Ovvels. Class and status! Perhaps he regrets having said those words. They would have become a joke, were Elphie capable of anything as casual as banter.
None of this is as crisply perceived as is summarized here. She picks up more than she knows by his easygoing, dialogic style. It’s only long after he is dead and she has herself abandoned Ovvels that she begins to admire his technique, and so to be grateful for his influence in her education.