"Wilhelm,_Kate_-_Symbiosis(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

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Symbiosis
by Kate Wilhelm
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Copyright (c)1972 Kate Wilhelm
First published in Cosmopolitan, The Hearst Corporation, 1972

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction and Fantasy


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BEACHAM, INDIANA, has 1,200 people, a train station that has no passenger service, a main street called Davenport Street, with a Woolworth's, a hamburger joint, Penney's, Wesson's hardware, Stuart's department store, a Jack and Jill shop, and a bakery. There is an ice-cream bar in the drugstore, and a gas station, and then you're out of downtown. The post office is a block south, and across the street from it is the municipal park with its cannon and a few benches pigeon-spattered and three oak trees. They are the only trees downtown. Town Hall is through the park, across First Street. The building is flush with the sidewalk, not set back at all. A red brick building with gray, wide stairs, and heavy double doors with brass hinges. The school is out of town, a cooperative school that serves the whole county. Every morning the yellow bus makes the run through town, then vanishes with the town's children, a mechanized Pied Piper, expelling exhaust fumes as it strips gears and groans and races its engine.
As soon as the children are old enough, or look old enough, they pile up in cars and race through the county to Valparaiso, where they spend their movie and soda money on beer or the drive-in, and the girls pick up boys and the boys leer at the local girls. They all know that our town is deadly, that it is out to get them. When they really are old enough, after the graduation exercises and the dance that goes on all night, with the morning light revealing drunk kids in cars, or on porch swings, or on each other's couches or, if the party was exceptionally "good," in jail, then they go off to college, or the army, and they vanish for good. Most of them never come back.
Through town, down Third Street, past the doctor's office, my father's office, on through four more blocks and out of town for a mile and a half to the McInally farm. Laura McInally and I have been friends for all our lives. We went to school together, the same Baptist church that is near her farm -- our town is almost universally Protestant, except for the fourteen Jewish families who go to Rensselaer to the synagogue, and the hundred or so Italian families who go to the Catholic church. Laura and I used to walk past the tiny Catholic church and pretend that we were being captured and carried inside, forced to don nuns' clothes, mistreated by the nun in charge, and threatened constantly by the priests who used young Protestant girls most shamefully. We would pull our hair back tight and try to imagine what we would look like with it all shaved off. We were certain that they would do that to us. What else they would do we never actually put into words, but rather talked all around it with ellipses.
David McInally, Laura's father, was a kind, red-faced man, who seemed to keep stores of tidbits in various pockets. His winter coat had nuts and caramels. His blue denim jacket had chewing gum. His tan work pants would yield lollipops. He was always surprised to find them there, and would hand them out as if glad to get rid of them. His life was regulated by corn. He had seven hundred acres planted in corn. He raised a few head of beef cattle, chickens, ducks, hogs; and he built: barns, silos, sheds, garages, a machine shop to care for his constantly growing fleet of farm machinery. The house was seventy years old and the kitchen had been remodeled once in the late forties. Other than that and the repairs that kept it from falling down, and occasional paint it never got touched.
It wasn't a secret that Laura was his favorite of the four children. He wouldn't let her carry in kindling wood, or take out garbage, or walk to the bus stop half a mile away. There never had been a thing that she said she wanted that he didn't get for her, almost instantly. Let the boys do it, was constantly on his lips. There was girl work and there was boy work, and he wouldn't have her doing any boy work, even after the boys had left home and she was as strong as a teen-aged boy anyway, and willing to do the small chores that her brothers had always done. But he wouldn't let her. Also he wouldn't let her stay out after dark, or sleep over at my house, or play rough games, or ride a bicycle to school, or take an overnight trip to Chicago with our class. It was a two-sided blade.
Mrs. McInally was pretty. As far back as I can remember I thought she was pretty. She had pale brown hair that curled around her face, and her eyes were bright blue. Her hands and feet were very small. Laura and I went through a period of awkwardness when we realized that our feet were larger than her mother's. She was plump, as a baby is. Her wrists were tiny, then her arms grew rounder until at the elbow they were dimpled and boneless-looking. Her fat legs tapered to shapely ankles and her waist was as small as mine, an hourglass figure that looked very pretty all the time. She sewed beautifully and made all of her own clothes; her dresses were gay and bright, even her Sunday best. She was like a fat little partridge with a mono-bosom, drawn-in waistline, round hips. I remember her as eternally busy, and all her business was centered on her family and home. There never was any question about where she was, everyone knew. She hummed in a monotone, and sometimes told very innocent, naive jokes. She mothered everyone. Since my own mother had died when I was six, she mothered me, lavishing kisses and good will and hospitality and love indiscriminately on her own children and me. Whenever she picked up a piece of material for a dress for Laura, she got one for me, too. Blue checks, white daisies on a field of blue, red candy stripes. I can remember every dress she ever made for me. All lovingly made up, beautifully finished and decorated with her own touches. An applique;, or a bit of lace, or a ruffle. I gave her nothing in return. It never occurred to me that I should. I accepted her love just as her own children did.
All the McInally children had inherited their father's features: they were blue-eyed, with long noses and full lips. But the curious thing was the way their eyes were set in the face. They hardly were sunken at all, as if the eye sockets were too shallow to accommodate them, so the whole eye was forced out even with the cheeks. Laura wore sunglasses almost constantly from the time she was fourteen. She could never be pretty, or even very attractive, with them off, but with them on, she was lovely. Her figure was probably the best in our class, her legs long and smooth and beautiful. I used to exercise, trying to get that same look, and never came near it. Her hair was sun-bleached to a near platinum blond. Every winter it darkened, and we both mourned for it, then the spring sunshine worked its magic and the darkness disappeared.
We graduated together and signed up for Purdue in September. All that summer we sewed and made handbags, and shopped for boots and new coats and gloves in Indianapolis. Mrs. McInally worked as hard as we did to get us ready for college. Poor Mr. McInally couldn't stand the "damn female flitterings from morning to night." He spent his summer with his hands in the fields, or in the barns.
Later I could reconstruct the changes that had been taking place in Mrs. McInally over the past few years, but they were too gradual at the time for comment. There were two older brothers, and a sister, all of them gone now. The first brother worked for a plastics firm in New York. The next one was in the Navy, making it his career. The sister lived in Los Angeles with her husband. As each one left, Mrs. McInally had become busier than ever with the ones remaining. By the time Laura was the only one at home, Mrs. McInally was feverishly busy on her account.
In August my father told me that he was giving up his practice in Beacham, that he was going to study in Chicago and specialize in ocular allergies. Also, he was going to be married. I really looked at him for the first time in years, I suppose. He was forty-eight then, overworked as a small town doctor is, but a handsome-enough man, stooped, almost bald, slack muscles now from inactivity, but potentially very nice. I cried and he had a tear or two and we talked all night and had breakfast, and that afternoon I met his fiancee, who was his age and a doctor. I was shocked and relieved that she was so old. They had met at a symposium in Chicago. They planned to marry as soon as I got settled down in school. I cried a little bit more, and we all ended up kissing each other.
The McInallys invited me to spend weekends and holidays with them that year. I said I wasn't sure yet, and we let it go at that. I realized that Beacham was no longer my home, never would be again, and with the thought I began to look at it with new eyes. The town was ugly, I learned that summer. I hadn't really known it before. It was ugly and dull, and the land around it was dull. Flat cornland as far as one could see. During most of the year there was nothing there but gray fields, or snow fields, then the burst of green that gradually faded to brown and disappeared. The wind was louder than I had realized before. In August the corn was six to eight feet high, and when the wind blew in from the west, it was like the blizzard wind, the same high-pitched wail, the same rustling, of corn, not snow. The stores were ugly, neglected. The hot west and south summer winds and the sun that turned the sky white were merciless, fading, bleaching, blistering paint. In the winter the white of the sky reflected the land, and the winds were brutal. Nothing stayed pointed or smooth. Everything developed a sameness. The park was hideous with its bare ground and its scraggly bushes that no one ever pruned or fertilized or sprayed. The leaves were riddled: some were black with fungus or black spot disease. The benches were grimy, never used.
Laura and I walked through town repeatedly, as if to imprint its ugliness on our brains so that we never would be tempted to return. I was going to study biology, and she was majoring in mathematics. She had a natural aptitude for mathematics that had been noticeable from the time she entered elementary school. None of the processes was ever a mystery to her; she knew intuitively how to add, subtract, how to derive a formula, how to do trig problems. In high school I'd do her essays and she'd do my algebra. It seemed fair enough then.
School frightened both of us more than anything else we had known. We knew each other and a sprinkling of other kids who had come from our county, and no one else. In our town we had known everybody. And from being high among the top third of the class effortlessly, we suddenly had to work. Everyone in college had been top third. My first test paper with a D on it shook me. And Laura sat up three nights in a row studying for a French test, getting tighter and tighter on bennies. She made a C. We both pulled in and settled down to do some serious work, and it was Christmas.
On Christmas Day I was embarrassed by the largess of the McInallys. I had bought them a silver candy dish, and they gave me presents that only a daughter could expect. I didn't know how to accept such presents, and knew that I had to, but they were paying very little attention to me then. Both parents' eyes were riveted with embarrassing intensity on Laura as she unwrapped gift after gift; my glance at them was an invasion of privacy. I watched Laura, too, then. There was a bewildering array of jewelry, sweaters, curler sets, bags, belts, records, and on and on and on. And finally there was a fur coat.
"Mother! Dad! Are you both crazy!" Laura jumped up and put it on, twisting, dancing in it, burying her hands and her face in the soft pelt. It was a tawny-colored mink, the most beautiful coat I had ever seen. It was almost exactly the color of her hair in the middle of the winter. "You can't do something like this!" she cried, but to take it from her then would have been barbaric. Mrs. McInally had tears in her eyes, and Mr. McInally began to search frantically for a match for his cigar. I had matches in my pocket and I started to approach him with a package, but he found his and then put the cigar down. Mrs. McInally and Laura were examining the coat by then, and I found myself studying Laura's father. The expression on his face was strange, as if he were holding his breath. But of course he wasn't doing anything of the sort. He watched his wife with an anxious look, and I realized with a feeling of sickness that he was afraid. My stomach felt queasy suddenly as I watched him watch his wife. All the cheer that he had been showing was gone and his ugly eyes looked fierce, and afraid, the way he had looked afraid one time when the bull got loose and Laura was in the same pasture on her pony, the same quietness that was all tension ready to spring. Then it was over and Laura was insisting that I try on the coat and the incident seemed so out of step with everything else happening that I was willing to believe that I had imagined it all.
Laura and I were busy all through the holidays, all our friends were in town, and there were parties and skating parties and sledding, and dances in each other's basements. It was as if we were desperately picking up our past again, knowing we couldn't do it many more times. Then back to Purdue for our midyear finals.
"Laura," I said the first night back in our dormitory, "your mother looked tired, didn't she?"
"She's always pooped by Christmas. She must have baked a ton of fruitcakes and cookies. She puts in weeks on decorating the house. You know."
"I guess." And God help me, I forgot the whole thing.
Neither of us covered ourselves with glory that first semester, but neither were we put on probation, so we decided that we were holding our own. Summer came closer and I had to decide what to do with myself. I couldn't accept being a houseguest for the whole summer vacation; finally I enrolled for courses and when school was out, Laura went home and I stayed on at Purdue, after a short holiday with my father and his new wife. We were all very polite; that was the lasting impression that I took from the week with them. In August I went to the McInally farm for two weeks.
Everything was exactly as it had been from my first recollection of the place. Even to Morris, the hired hand, who never said anything, but grinned happily at us all. On a fairly regular basis Laura was dating Stephen Rodman, home from Harvard. Not exactly going steady, but almost.
One night, two days before we were to leave for school again, I woke up with my heart pounding hard, and prickles on my arms and legs. My mouth was dry and for a long time I couldn't move, then I managed to lift my head and I saw Mrs. McInally. She was sitting in a chair near the window, watching Laura.
She got up immediately and moved toward the door. "I just came in to check," she whispered, but she lied. She had been sitting there. How long? I stared at the ceiling, unable until dawn to return to sleep.
At breakfast she said to Laura, "Billy Washburn called again last night."
"Pretty Billy?" Laura giggled and spread apple jelly on toast.
"Don't call him that. He's a very nice boy."
"Oh, Mother!"
"Well, from what I hear about the Rodman boy and from what I know about Billy, I'd say that you could do worse. You could."
"Mother!" Laura refused to comment further. But the inflection, her disdain, the way she dismissed the idea without another word, it was clear that Pretty Billy was not her idea of date material.
Billy Washburn had graduated with us, by the grace of most of his teachers. He always had been the best-looking boy in school, large, well-built, excellent in all sports, voted most popular boy. He worked for his father, who had a first-rate mechanic shop. Billy wanted no more than that. He never dreamed of leaving Beacham. I thought of him and Laura and smiled. With her sunglasses and her mink coat and boots she looked just like a starlet.
I didn't go back to the McInally farm for over a year. I went to Jamaica with my father and his wife for Christmas, and at midterm I stayed with them in Chicago. We weren't all being so very polite to each other anymore and they both had wanted me, that was clear. Laura didn't want to go home. Her mother was driving her crazy, she said. Menopause, you know. She stared broodingly at the wall, then shrugged. She went down to Fort Lauderdale for Easter with friends from school, so I went back to Chicago, without even thinking about asking this time. I simply called and said when I'd be there and that was that. Later I had to smile at my first impression of his wife; she was really very nice and quite attractive, and not at all old. We were becoming very good friends. That summer I stayed with them and took some courses at Northwestern.
In our third year Laura began to show signs of restiveness. She talked about changing her major, about dropping out entirely, about joining the Peace Corps for a year or two. She was doing beautiful work, and was on full scholarship now, with her future so assured that to talk about changing anything was insane. Suddenly corners were being cut for her, red tape was fading away, the drudgery of undergraduate work was being shelved. I was frankly envious, but she was cynical about it.
"They want to use me," she said. "I'm a thing to them. A thing they can hone up and use. I just don't want it. What if I can't do what they want? Then what? The junk pile?"