Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (103 page)

Then silence and just Agatha lying on the asphalt, intact, getting ready to sob.

And still we did not move, frozen on the sill of death, afraid to venture in any direction, afraid to go see what lay beyond the car and Agatha and so we began to wail and, I guess, pray to ourselves as Father stood amongst us: Oh, no, no, we mourned, oh no, God, no, no…

Agatha lifted her already grief-stricken face and it was the face of someone who has predicted dooms and lived to see and now did not want to see or live any more. As we watched, she turned her gaze to the tossed woman’s body and tears fell from her eyes. She shut them and covered them and lay back down forever to weep…

I took a step and then another step and then five quick steps and by the time I reached my sister her head was buried deep and her sobs came up out of a place so far down in her I was afraid I could never find her again, she would never come out, no matter how I pried or pleaded or promised or threatened or just plain said. And what little we could hear from Agatha buried there in her own misery, she said over and over again, lamenting, wounded, certain of the old threat known and named and now here forever. ‘…Like I said…told you…lies…lies…liars…all lies…like the other…other…just like…just…just like the other…other…other…!’

I was down on my knees holding on to her with both hands, trying to put her back together even though she wasn’t broken any way you could see but just feel, because I knew it was no use going on to Grandma, no use at all, so I just touched Agatha and gentled her and wept while Father came up and stood over and knelt down with me and it was like a prayer meeting in the middle of the street and lucky no more cars coming, and I said, choking, ‘Other what, Ag, other
what
?’

Agatha exploded two words.

‘Other dead!’

‘You mean Mom?’

‘O Mom,’ she wailed, shivering, lying down, cuddling up like a baby. ‘O Mom, dead, O Mom and now Grandma dead, she promised always, always, to love, to love, promised to be different, promised, promised and now look, look…I hate her, I hate Mom. I hate her. I hate
them
!’

‘Of course,’ said a voice. ‘It’s only natural. How foolish of me not to have known, not to have seen.’

And the voice was so familiar we were all stricken.

We all jerked.

Agatha squinched her eyes, flicked them wide, blinked, and jerked half up, staring.

‘How silly of me,’ said Grandma, standing there at the edge of our circle, our prayer, our wake.

‘Grandma!’ we all said.

And she stood there, taller by far than any of us in this moment of kneeling and holding and crying out. We could only stare up at her in disbelief.

‘You’re dead!’ cried Agatha. ‘The car—’

‘Hit me,’ said Grandma, quietly. ‘Yes. And threw me in the air and tumbled me over and for a few moments there was a severe concussion of circuitries. I might have feared a disconnection, if fear is the word. But then I sat up and gave myself a shake and the few molecules of paint, jarred loose on one printed path or another, magnetized back in position and resilient creature that I am, unbreakable thing that I am,
here
I am.’

‘I thought you were—’ said Agatha.

‘And only natural,’ said Grandma. ‘I mean, anyone else, hit like that, tossed like that. But, O my dear Agatha, not me. And now I see why you were afraid and never trusted me. You didn’t know. And I had not as yet proved my singular ability to survive. How dumb of me not to have thought to show you. Just a second.’ Somewhere in her head, her body, her being, she fitted together some invisible tapes, some old information made new by interblending. She nodded. ‘Yes. There. A book of child-raising, laughed at by some few people years back when the woman who wrote the book said, as final advice to parents: “Whatever you do, don’t die. Your children will never forgive you.”’

‘Forgive,’ some one of us whispered.

‘For how can children understand when you just up and go away and never come back again with no excuse, no apologies, no sorry note, nothing.’

‘They can’t,’ I said.

‘So,’ said Grandma, kneeling down with us beside Agatha who sat up now, new tears brimming her eyes, but a different kind of tears, not tears that drowned, but tears that washed clean. ‘So your mother ran away to death. And after that, how
could
you trust anyone? If everyone left, vanished finally, who
was
there to trust? So when I came, half-wise, half-ignorant, I should have known, I did not know, why you would not accept me. For, very simply and honestly, you feared I might not stay, that I lied, that I was vulnerable, too. And two leavetakings, two deaths, were one too many in a single year. But now, do you
see
, Abigail?’

‘Agatha,’ said Agatha, without knowing she corrected.

‘Do you understand, I shall always, always be here?’

‘Oh, yes,’ cried Agatha, and broke down into a solid weeping in which we all joined, huddled together, and cars drew up and stopped to see just how many people were hurt and how many people were getting well right there.

End of story.

Well, not quite the end.

We lived happily ever after.

Or rather we lived together, Grandma, Agatha-Agamemnon-Abigail, Timothy, and I, Tom, and Father, and Grandma calling us to frolic in great fountains of Latin and Spanish and French, in great seaborne gouts of poetry like Moby Dick sprinkling the deeps with his Versailles jet somehow lost in calms and found in storms; Grandma a constant, a clock, a pendulum, a face to tell all time by at noon, or in the middle of sick nights when, raving with fever, we saw her forever by our beds, never gone, never away, always waiting, always speaking kind words, her cool hand icing our hot brows, the tappet of her uplifted forefinger unsprung to let a twine of cold mountain water touch our flannel tongues. Ten thousand dawns she cut our wildflower lawn, ten thousand nights she wandered, remembering the dust molecules that fell in the still hours before dawn, or sat whispering some lesson she felt needed teaching to our ears while we slept snug.

Until at last, one by one, it was time for us to go away to school, and when at last the youngest, Agatha, was all packed, why Grandma packed, too.

On the last day of summer that last year, we found Grandma down in the front room with various packets and suitcases, knitting, waiting, and though she had often spoken of it, now that the time came we were shocked and surprised.

‘Grandma!’ we all said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Why going off to college, in a way, just like you,’ she said. ‘Back to Guido Fantoccini’s, to the Family.’

‘The Family?’

‘Of Pinocchios, that’s what he called us for a joke, at first. The Pinocchios and himself Geppetto. And then later gave us his own name: the Fantoccini. Anyway, you have been my family here. Now I go back to my even larger family there, my brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, all robots who—’

‘Who do
what
?’ asked Agatha.

‘It all depends,’ said Grandma. ‘Some stay, some linger. Others go to be drawn and quartered, you might say, their parts distributed to other machines who have need of repairs. They’ll weigh and find me wanting
or not wanting. It may be I’ll be just the one they need tomorrow and off I’ll go to raise another batch of children and beat another batch of fudge.’

‘Oh, they mustn’t draw and quarter you!’ cried Agatha.

‘No!’ I cried, with Timothy.

‘My allowance,’ said Agatha, ‘I’ll pay anything…?’

Grandma stopped rocking and looked at the needles and the pattern of bright yarn. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have said, but now you ask and I’ll tell. For a very
small
fee, there’s a room, the room of the Family, a large dim parlor, all quiet and nicely decorated, where as many as thirty or forty of the Electric Women sit and rock and talk, each in her turn. I have not been there. I am, after all, freshly born, comparatively new. For a small fee, very small, each month and year, that’s where I’ll be, with all the others like me, listening to what they’ve learned of the world and, in my turn, telling how it was with Tom and Tim and Agatha and how fine and happy we were. And I’ll tell all I learned from you.’

‘But…you taught
us
!’

‘Do you
really
think that?’ she said. ‘No, it was turnabout, roundabout, learning both ways. And it’s all in here, everything you flew into tears about or laughed over, why, I have it all. And I’ll tell it to the others just as they tell their boys and girls and life to me. We’ll sit there, growing wiser and calmer and better every year and every year, ten, twenty, thirty years. The Family knowledge will double, quadruple, the wisdom will not be lost. And we’ll be waiting there in that sitting room, should you ever need us for your own children in time of illness, or, God prevent, deprivation or death. There we’ll be, growing old but not old, getting closer to the time, perhaps, someday, when we live up to our first strange joking name.’

‘The Pinocchios?’ asked Tim.

Grandma nodded.

I knew what she meant. The day when, as in the old tale. Pinocchio had grown so worthy and so fine that the gift of life had been given him. So I saw them, in future years, the entire family of Fantoccini, the Pinocchios, trading and retrading, murmuring and whispering their knowledge in the great parlors of philosophy, waiting for the day. The day that could never come.

Grandma must have read that thought in our eyes.

‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘Let’s just wait and see.’

‘Oh, Grandma,’ cried Agatha and she was weeping as she had wept many years before. ‘You don’t have to wait. You’re alive. You’ve always been alive to us!’

And she caught hold of the old woman and we all caught hold for a long moment and then ran off up in the sky to faraway schools and years
and her last words to us before we let the helicopter swarm us away into autumn were these:

‘When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher-nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear.’

‘Oh, we shall never be old!’ we cried. ‘That will never happen!’

‘Never! Never!’

And we were gone.

And the years are flown.

And we are old now. Tim and Agatha and I.

Our children are grown and gone, our wives and husbands vanished from the earth and now, by Dickensian coincidence, accept it as you will or not accept, back in the old house, we three.

I lie here in the bedroom which was my childish place seventy, O seventy, believe it, seventy years ago. Beneath this wallpaper is another layer and yet another-times-three to the old wallpaper covered over when I was nine. The wallpaper is peeling. I see peeking from beneath, old elephants, familiar tigers, fine and amiable zebras, irascible crocodiles. I have sent for the paperers to carefully remove all but that last layer. The old animals will live again on the walls, revealed.

And we have sent for someone else.

The three of us have called:

Grandma! You said you’d come back when we had need.

We are surprised by age, by time. We are old, We
need
.

And in three rooms of a summer house very late in time, three old children rise up, crying out in their heads: We
loved
you! We
love
you!

There! There! in the sky, we think, waking at morn. Is that the delivery machine? Does it settle to the lawn?

There! There on the grass by the front porch. Does the mummy case arrive?

Are our names inked on ribbons wrapped about the lovely form beneath the golden mask?!

And the kept gold key, forever hung on Agatha’s breast, warmed and waiting? Oh God, will it, after all these years, will it wind, will it set in motion, will it, dearly,
fit
?!

It was as if a light came on in a green room.

The ocean burned. A white phosphorescence stirred like a breath of steam through the autumn morning sea, rising. Bubbles rose from the throat of some hidden sea ravine.

Like lightning in the reversed green sky of the sea it was aware. It was old and beautiful. Out of the deeps it came, indolently. A shell, a wisp, a bubble, a weed, a glitter, a whisper, a gill. Suspended in its depths were brainlike trees of frosted coral, eyelike pips of yellow kelp, hairlike fluids of weed. Growing with the tides, growing with the ages, collecting and hoarding and saving unto itself identities and ancient dusts, octopus-inks and all the trivia of the sea.

Until now—it was aware.

It was a shining green intelligence, breathing in the autumn sea. Eyeless but seeing, earless but hearing, bodyless but feeling. It was of the sea. And being of the sea it was—feminine.

It in no way resembled man or woman. But it had a woman’s ways, the silken, sly, and hidden ways. It moved with a woman’s grace. It was all the evil things of vain women.

Dark waters flowed through and by and mingled with strange memory on its way to the gulf streams. In the water were carnival caps, horns, serpentine, confetti. They passed through this blossoming mass of long green hair like wind through an ancient tree. Orange peels, napkins, papers, eggshells, and burnt kindling from night fires on the beaches; all the flotsam of the gaunt high people who stalked on the lone sands of the continental islands, people from brick cities, people who shrieked in metal demons down concrete highways, gone.

It rose softly, shimmering, foaming, into cool morning airs.

The green hair rose softly, shimmering, foaming, into cool morning airs. It lay in the swell after the long time of forming through darkness.

It perceived the shore.

The man was there.

He was a sun-darkened man with strong legs and a cow body.

Each day he should have come down to the water, to bathe, to swim. But he had never moved. There was a woman on the sand with him, a woman in a black bathing suit who lay next to him talking quietly, laughing. Sometimes they held hands, sometimes they listened to a little sounding machine that they dialed and out of which music came.

The phosphorescence hung quietly in the waves. It was the end of the season. September. Things were shutting down.

Any day now he might go away and never return.

Today he must come in the water.

They lay on the sand with the heat in them. The radio played softly and the woman in the black bathing suit stirred fitfully, eyes closed.

The man did not lift his head from where he cushioned it on his muscled left arm. He drank the sun with his face, his open mouth, his nostrils. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘A bad dream,’ said the woman in the black suit.

‘Dreams in the daytime?’

‘Don’t
you
ever dream in the afternoon?’

‘I
never
dream. I’ve never had a dream in my life.’

She lay there, fingers twitching. ‘God, I had a horrible dream.’

‘What about?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, as if she really didn’t. It was so bad she had forgotten. Now, eyes shut, she tried to remember.

‘It was about me,’ he said, lazily, stretching.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling to himself. ‘I was off with another woman, that’s what.’

‘No.’

‘I insist,’ he said. ‘There I was, off with another woman, and you discovered us, and somehow, in all the mix-up, I got shot or something.’

She winced involuntarily. ‘Don’t talk that way.’

‘Let’s see now,’ he said. ‘What sort of woman was I with? Gentlemen prefer blondes, don’t they?’

‘Please don’t joke,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel well.’

He opened his eyes. ‘Did it affect you that much?’

She nodded. ‘Whenever I dream in the daytime this way, it depresses me something terrible.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He took her hand. ‘Anything I can get you?’

‘No.’

‘Ice cream cone? Eskimo Pie? A Coke?’

‘You’re a dear, but no. I’ll be all right. It’s just that, the last four days
haven’t been right. This isn’t like it used to be early in the summer. Something’s happened.’

‘Not between us,’ he said.

‘Oh, no, of course not,’ she said quickly. ‘But don’t you feel that sometimes
places
change? Even a thing like a pier changes, and the merrygo-rounds, and all that. Even the hot dogs taste different this week.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They taste old. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve lost my appetite, and I wish this vacation were over. Really, what I want to do most of all is go home.’

‘Tomorrow’s our last day. You know how much this extra week means to me.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘If only this place didn’t feel so funny and changed. I don’t know. But all of a sudden I just had a feeling I wanted to get up and run.’

‘Because of your dream? Me and my blonde and me dead all of a sudden.’

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk about dying that way!’

She lay there very close to him. ‘If I only knew what it was.’

‘There.’ He stroked her. ‘I’ll protect you.’

‘It’s not me, it’s you,’ her breath whispered in his ear. ‘I had the feeling that you were tired of me and went away.’

‘I wouldn’t do that; I love you.’

‘I’m silly.’ She forced a laugh. ‘God, what a silly thing I am.’

They lay quietly, the sun and sky over them like a lid.

‘You know,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘I get a little of that feeling you’re talking about. This place has changed. There
is
something different.’

‘I’m glad you feel it, too.’

He shook his head, drowsily, smiling softly, shutting his eyes, drinking the sun. ‘Both crazy. Both crazy.’ Murmuring. ‘Both.’

The sea came in on the shore three times, softly.

The afternoon came on. The sun struck the skies a grazing blow. The yachts bobbed hot and shining white in the harbor swells. The smells of fried meat and burnt onion filled the wind. The sand whispered and stirred like an image in a vast, melting mirror.

The radio at their elbow murmured discreetly. They lay like dark arrows on the white sand. They did not move. Only their eyelids flickered with awareness, only their ears were alert. Now and again their tongues might slide along their baking lips. Sly prickles of moisture appeared on their brows to be burned away by the sun.

He lifted his head, blindly, listening to the heat.

The radio sighed.

He put his head down for a minute.

She felt him lift himself again. She opened one eye and he rested on
one elbow looking around, at the pier, at the sky, at the water, at the sand.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said, lying down again.

‘Something,’ she said.

‘I thought I heard something.’

‘The radio.’

‘No, not the radio. Something else.’

‘Somebody
else’s
radio.’

He didn’t answer. She felt his arm tense and relax, tense and relax. ‘Dammit,’ he said. ‘There it is, again.’

They both lay listening.

‘I don’t hear anything—’

‘Shh!’ he cried. ‘For God’s sake—’

The waves broke on the shore, silent mirrors, heaps of melting, whispering glass.

‘Somebody singing.’

‘What?’

‘I’d swear it was someone singing.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘No, listen.’

They did that for a while.

‘I don’t hear a thing,’ she said, turning very cold.

He was on his feet. There was nothing in the sky, nothing on the pier, nothing on the sand, nothing in the hot-dog stands. There was a staring silence, the wind blowing over his ears, the wind preening along the light, blowing hairs of his arms and legs.

He took a step toward the sea.

‘Don’t!’ she said.

He looked down at her, oddly, as if she were not there. He was still listening.

She turned the portable radio up loud. It exploded words and rhythm and melody:

‘—I found a million-dollar baby—’

He made a wry face, raising his open palm violently. ‘Turn it off.’

‘No, I like it!’ She turned it louder. She snapped her fingers, rocking her body vaguely, trying to smile.

It was two o’clock.

The sun steamed the waters. The ancient pier expanded with a loud groan in the heat. The birds were held in the hot sky, unable to move. The sun struck through the green liquors that poured about the pier; struck, caught and burnished an idle whiteness that drifted in the offshore ripples.

The white foam, the frosted coral brain, the kelp pip, the tide dust lay in the water, spreading.

The dark man lay on the sand, the woman in the black suit beside him.

Music drifted up like mist from the water. It was a whispering music of deep tides and passed years, of salt and travel, of accepted and familiar strangenesses. The music sounded not unlike water on the shore, rain falling, the turn of soft limbs in the depths. It was a singing of a time-lost voice in a caverned seashell. The hissing and sighing of tides in deserted holds of treasure ships. The sound the wind makes in an empty skull thrown out on the baked sand.

But the radio on the blanket on the beach played louder.

The phosphorescence, light as a woman, sank down, tired, from sight. Only a few more hours. They might leave at any time. If only he would come in, for an instant, just an instant. The mists stirred silently, aware of his face and his body in the water, deep under. Aware of him caught, held, as they sank ten fathoms down, on a sluice that bore them twisting and turning in frantic gesticulations, to the depths of a hidden gulf in the sea.

The heat of his body, the water taking fire from his warmth, and the frosted coral brain, the jeweled dusts, the salted mists feeding on his hot breath from his open lips.

The waves moved the soft and changing thoughts into the shallows which were tepid as bath waters from the two o’clock sun.

He mustn’t go away. If he goes now, he’ll not return.

Now
. The cold coral brain drifted, drifted.
Now
. Calling across the hot spaces of windless air in the early afternoon.
Come down to the water. Now
, said the music.
Now
.

The woman in the black bathing suit twisted the radio dial.

‘Attention!’ cried the radio, ‘Now, today, you can buy a new car at—’

‘Jesus!’ The man reached over and tuned the scream down. ‘Must you have it so loud!’

‘I like it loud,’ said the woman in the black bathing suit, looking over her shoulder at the sea.

It was three o’clock. The sky was all sun.

Sweating, he stood up. ‘I’m going in,’ he said.

‘Get me a hot dog first?’ she said.

‘Can’t you wait until I come out?’

‘Please.’ She pouted. ‘
Now
.’

‘Everything on it?’

‘Yes, and bring
three
of them.’

‘Three? God, what an appetite!’ He ran off to the small café.

She waited until he was gone. Then she turned the radio off. She lay listening a long time. She heard nothing. She looked at the water until the glints and shatters of sun stabbed through her eyes like needles.

The sea had quieted. There was only a faint, far and fine net of ripples giving off sunlight in infinite repetition. She squinted again and again at the water, scowling.

He bounded back. ‘Damn, but the sand’s hot; burns my feet off!’ He flung himself on the blanket. ‘Eat ’em up!’

She took the three hot dogs and fed quietly on one of them. When she finished it, she handed him the remaining two. ‘Here, you finish them. My eyes are bigger than my stomach.’

He swallowed the hot dogs in silence. ‘Next time,’ he said, finishing, ‘don’t order more than you can use. Helluva waste.’

‘Here,’ she said, unscrewing a thermos, ‘you must be thirsty. Finish our lemonade.’

‘Thanks.’ He drank. Then he slapped his hands together and said. ‘Well, I’ll go jump in the water now.’ He looked anxiously at the bright sea.

‘Just one more thing,’ she said, just remembering it. ‘Will you buy me a bottle of suntan oil? I’m all out.’

‘Haven’t you some in your purse?’

‘I used it all.’

‘I wish you’d told me when I was up there buying the hot dogs,’ he said. ‘But, okay.’ He ran back, loping steadily.

When he was gone, she took the suntan bottle from her purse, halffull, unscrewed the cap, and poured the liquid into the sand, covering it over surreptitiously, looking out at the sea, and smiling. She rose then and went down to the edge of the sea and looked out, searching the innumerable small and insignificant waves.

You can’t have him, she thought. Whoever or whatever you are, he’s mine, and you can’t have him. I don’t know what’s going on; I don’t know anything, really. All I know is we’re going on a train tonight at seven. And we won’t be here tomorrow. So you can just stay here and wait, ocean, sea, or whatever it is that’s wrong here today.

Do your damnedest; you’re no match for me, she thought. She picked up a stone and threw it at the sea.

‘There!’ she cried. ‘You.’

He was standing beside her.

‘Oh?’ She jumped back.

‘Hey, what gives? You standing here, muttering?’

‘Was I?’ She was surprised at herself. ‘Where’s the suntan oil? Will you put it on my back?’

He poured a yellow twine of oil and massaged it onto her golden back. She looked out at the water from time to time, eyes sly, nodding at the water as if to say. ‘Look! You see? Ah-ha!’ She purred like a kitten.

‘There.’ He gave her the bottle.

He was half into the water before she yelled.

‘Where are you going! Come here!’

He turned as if she were someone he didn’t know. ‘For God’s sake, what’s wrong?’

‘Why, you just finished your hot dogs and lemonade—you can’t go in the water now and get cramps!’

He scoffed. ‘Old wives’ tales.’

‘Just the same, you come back up on the sand and wait an hour before you go in, do you hear? I won’t have you getting a cramp and drowning.’

‘Ah,’ he said, disgusted.