This is nearly all I am going to tell you about.
All the palaver, the arrangements, the saying good-byes, the questions about funding. An endless series of knots to unravel and to tie up again. It is some months before the day arrives.
Nanny is to stay behind in Qhoyre with Nessa and Shell. Nanny has been weepy, Nessa brilliantly envious, and Shell bored by it all, and pissy. Elphaba has been busy stomping away in a new pair of thick leather boots, the type that miners wear. Breaking them in. Who is paying for what, she doesn’t know for sure and doesn’t ask. Maybe there are stipends for poor students. Or Pari’isi Menga’al, who has come by once or twice more, might have ponied up some funds in honor of his nephew. Perhaps Unger Bi’ix cashed in those vegetable pearls of Pari’isi To’or’s that Elphie had once given him. Whatever. The fees are taken care of, and Elphaba doesn’t worry about it. Money doesn’t interest her at all, neither glad of it in hand nor vexed when it’s in short supply. Such a bother.
On the final visit of Pari’isi Menga’al before her departure, he hands her a good-luck gift. A vegetable pearl kitted out with the kind of hooking apparatus suitable for attachment to an ear lobe. It belonged to Pari’isi To’or. A token of friendship, perhaps.
Elphie has learned enough manners to say thank you—just in time before she’s considered rude as skunk cabbage and her bursary is reclaimed by the offended donor. But after the uncle leaves, Elphie strolls down to the river and she drives a sharp, sparkling arc through the sky, delivering herself of the need to husband souvenirs of friendship. The vegetable pearl sinks back toward where it grew. She has no appetite for friendship and she wants no obligations of affection.
The past promises us nothing but this: it will abandon us. Leave us orphaned. Unless we abandon it first.
On the day of departure, Nanny is beside herself dispensing teary advice, blessings of Lurlina, cautions and promises and doomy predictions. Finally she throws her apron over her head, a well-timed means of stifling herself because Elphie has been about to do it for her.
Shell goes into hiding and won’t come out, and he may not even be on the premises. She can’t blame him. Elphie is abandoning him, after all. She’d feel just as ornery. Probably.
But Nessa, Nessa comes forward in her bare feet, and stands in the light of the window. The steam of horse manure from the stalls below wreaths about her and is somehow relieved of stink. Elphie, her heart torn, thinks: this is what holiness can do, maybe: denature the world.
“I should give you a gift,” says Nessa in a fake, formal voice, “but all I have are my wounds.”
“Well, I don’t want those,” says Elphie, not able to help herself.
“The wounds in my heart,” explains Nessa.
“Oh.” Outside, a clock in a tower chimes. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t know how to care for them. But I have something for you.” She reaches in the pocket of her traveling apron and pulls out a small stone, easy on the palm, a perfect black egg of a stone. “I found this one day on the shore near the lagoon. Does it remind you of anything?”
“Should it?”
“The black stone in the water that we turned into a marsh plum overnight. The hex that probably wasn’t a hex. Don’t you remember? Or were you too little?”
“I can’t pick it up,” Nessa reminds her sister. “Are you going to push it in my throat to silence my prayers for you?”
“Nessa, I’ll take any prayers you have to spare, I guess. No, this stone—it’s something inert and yet full of, um, possibility. You could still hex your own life, Nessa.”
“You know I don’t look kindly on—”
“I don’t mean hex with magicks. I mean change. Follow in my footsteps, or someone else’s. Get out. When it’s your turn. Make the black stone into something worth biting into—like a marsh plum. I don’t know. It’s a token. Get it? I thought you’d remember.”
Nessa’s smile is wan and watery; that’s the unwelcome tears on their way. “It doesn’t matter if I was too small to remember. You have done it for me. You took care of me. I don’t need a symbol to remind me of that.”
Elphie sets the stone down anyway on the windowsill. She would clasp Nessa’s hands if—if. Instead she circles an arm around her sister’s waist. They are not embracing, they are just walking together, back and forth in front of the window, into the sunlight and out of it, silently. Parallel shadows on the floorboards.
Now, most of what I say next is conjecture.
Frex and Elphaba will travel by coach on a rural route that bows west to avoid the capital of Oz. Frex will say he doesn’t want Elphaba to come up against the snares and temptations of the Emerald City. While this may be prudent, Elphaba will think her father is hiding his own uncertainty about a city even larger than Qhoyre, one where as a Munchkinlander he would be an unwelcome foreigner yet again.
The capital city. One day perhaps she will go there. On her own.
But now, after ten days or more of traveling in silence, Frex praying in the corner of the carriage and Elphaba trying to read the texts that the admissions committee has recommended, the unpainted country trap drawn by the hired horse will arrive at its destination. Shiz will be a perky place, brisk and sunny. The climate will be dry, something almost entirely new to Elphaba, raised as she’s been in humidity. The lofty trees will spread their limbs farther apart, and the leaves will be more plentiful, more pliant, smaller. There will likely be movement of wind in the branches, a dry current rather than a wet one, blundering noisily in the air all around them.
Shiz University having sent instructions on how to locate the welcome hall, the bewildered driver will navigate city boulevards and lanes and get there at last. Impressed with itself, the foursquare granite building will squat heavily on a napkin of lawn littered with colorful red and yellow leaves. If the green trees can turn colors here, thinks Elphaba in a rare moment of metaphor, maybe I can, too.
Her father will help her down from the trap with a hand accustomed to assisting his other daughter. Where Elphaba will refuse to cry, he will blow his nose. He will pull down her reticule. He has given Elphaba permission to take her mother’s old valise, the one that once held all Melena’s clothes. Also the oval mirror. The clothes have all been given away by now, but the mirror will rest at the bottom of Elphaba’s folded garments, and papers, and books of her very own.
“Don’t be lonely,” her father will say. “If this works out for you, perhaps in time I’ll be able to send Nessarose along as well. Will you write to us?”
Elphie looking about. Other members of the college congregating. On the pavement, in dark scholarly robes, stand three distinguished-looking older men and—sweet Lurline!—what seems to be a Goat, balanced on his hind legs, in conference with an Ape in high regalia. They turn to regard her with a cool skepticism. This isn’t going to work. She should get back in the carriage and return to the marshland. She almost reaches for her father’s hand.
The five professors, if that’s who they are, will be interrupted in their scrutiny by another carriage arriving. The faculty members pivot, blocking Elphie’s view. She can’t quite see, but she infers a bright golden presence, a student with a trilling voice who emerges and descends from the carriage—she will declare as if delighted with her own competence—So here I am, I did make it on my own, straight from the station, Doctor, imagine! Their attention to some mesmerizing newcomer is discomfiting, but welcome; this gives Elphie a chance to take a deep breath and summon her nerve.
She turns her sharp chin away from the new arrivals. Time enough for all that.
“Don’t be daft. Of course I will write, Father.”
“A piece of advice.”
“No. Thank you, but no. Anything you could teach me, you’ve already done. I won’t forget it. But I am here to learn something else.”
She’ll stand back a step. She won’t kiss him or embrace him, but I imagine she will touch him lightly on his forearm. He will watch her stump up the paving stones to the front steps of the hall. How she will be hurrying, as if he might change his mind! The building’s high windows will gleam, reflecting a candied blue run through with strange thin clouds. The skies of a foreign climate. One that will become hers. There she will stand, in a dark traveling frock that draws no attention to itself, as befits a minister’s daughter. The doors of the hall will swing open before her. She won’t look back. What happens next will be her story, not his, so he will turn away as she flies forward.
That’s how I see it anyway. But what do I know, really? It’s all conjecture. An assessment totted up by the inchoate witnesses of these rough years. We are the wet wind, the lazy, refulgent riverways, maybe the gazing globe, maybe the polter-Monkey. Watching. Watching from the dark past toward the green dawn. Waiting to see how it plays out.