Strange Sisters

Chapter 7

She was caught in the centrifugal action, whirled around and around the circumference of the conical world. Then she was flung out of the whirling mass in a great, high dizzy arc, and she was standing alone at a great altitude on an arid lip of rock. Below her was the world, and the world was no longer a whirling spiral of many colors but was now a colorless and desolate cup of perfect stillness. Above and beyond her, outside the world, there was a sound like rollicking thunder, and pretty soon she identified it as the laughter of God. God sat on an electron with His feet on a proton and held His sides and laughed and laughed and laughed with the rollicking, thunderous laughter. Leaning forward from the lip of rock, she stuck a finger into the cup of the world and found that it was dry. She pushed the cup away from her and said to God, “Fill it up. Fill up the cup of the world.”

“Lady,” said the bartender, “you’ve had enough. Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

She looked at the bartender, and he was not a man. Neither was he a woman. Neither a he nor a she was he. He was an It. It was an It. How beautiful and considerate was the English language to have the neuter gender, a wonderful and wide and pacific category that was neither one thing nor the other. Other languages weren’t like that. Some other languages. Spanish, for example. She had studied Spanish in high school, and she had hated it because nothing was neuter, everything was he or she. Even pens and pencils were he and she. El and la. She was very clever to remember that from away back in high school. Good morning, Mr. Pencil. Good morning, Miss Pen. No neuter. Never any beautiful It. The neuter was a green and quiet little island in a stormy sea, and you swam and swam in the stormy sea until your arms and legs were like lead, and the soul inside you was exhausted and indifferent, and just when you decided to quit swimming and sink into the dark water, you came to the little neuter island, and you climbed up onto it and rested, and after a while your muscles and your soul were ready to swim again.

She said to the bartender, “The cup of the world is empty, It. Fill up the cup, It.”

“Please, lady,” he said. “You’ve had enough.”

“Enough?” She looked at him slyly and laughed. “You are so right, It. I’ve had enough. I’ve had more than enough, if you only knew it. Do you hear that sound? If you listen very closely, you can hear it. It’s like thunder a long way off. Do you know what it is? It’s God laughing. It’s God laughing because I’ve had enough.”

“You just take it easy, lady. I’ll tell you what. You get back in the booth, and I’ll bring you some nice black coffee.”

She clapped her hands softly. “That’s a good idea. Oh, that’s a fine idea.” She leaned forward across the bar and whispered, “Tell me. It, is God an It?”

“I don’t know anything about God, lady. I don’t like to talk about things like that.”

She laughed gleefully and clapped her hands again. “Things. Things, you said. A thing is an It, isn’t it? Of course a thing is an It. So you answered my question. Of course you know something about God. Everyone knows about God, and everyone talks about God, but no one does anything about God.”

She took time to think about that last bit, and to laugh a little more. It struck her as being a very clever thing to say, even if it wasn’t exactly something she had thought of entirely by herself. It was a kind of twist on something someone had said about the weather, but it required a certain amount of cleverness just to remember things and make twists on them. Things like that just came into her mind. Like Macbeth and Shakespeare and the bit about sleep. Like the color of the hair.

She quit laughing and said, “What color is God’s hair?”

“I wouldn’t know, lady. I’ve never seen God.”

“That’s too bad. It would be very interesting to know the color of His hair. Do you suppose he’s bald, like you? Do you understand that you’re very fortunate to be bald?”

“I never figured I was so lucky. I spent a fortune on tonics.”

“Oh? Did you have hair once?”

“Sure I had hair. Everyone has hair sometime.”

“Tell me something. This is very important, so you must tell me the truth. What color was your hair when you had hair?”

“I’m not sure, lady. It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten. It was just sort of hair-colored hair, I think.”

She straightened in a kind of triumphant posture, swaying a little on the stool, and looked at him with wide eyes. “You see? You are fortunate. You’re one of God’s fortunate children. God loved you and gave you hair-colored hair and then made you bald. Because when you have hair-colored hair or no hair at all, there is no question. The color’s the thing. If the color isn’t right, it’s very bad for you. You should thank God because He gave you hair-colored hair and made you bald.”

“Okay, lady. Thanks, God.”

She nodded and leaned forward again abruptly, halting the collapse of her body with her elbows on the bar. She liked this bartender. She had great faith in him because he was an It and because he was bald and had once had hair-colored hair.

“Now you must tell me the truth again,” she said. “Please don’t spare me because you have a kind heart. Look at me and tell me truthfully what color my hair is.”

“It’s brown, lady. Dark brown. Very pretty, too.”

She took hold of a lock and pulled it down across her forehead in front of her eyes and examined it closely. She said sadly, “You didn’t tell the truth. You lied to me. I’m sure you meant it kindly, and I thank you for being kind, but to tell me a lie was really the most unkind thing of all. Shall I tell you the color of my hair?”

“It looks brown to me.”

“It’s not. It’s nameless. It’s abominable. The nameless and abominable color of my hair.”

Again she was overwhelmed by self-pity. She let her head fall forward gently onto her forearms, and the silent tears gathered and fell down onto the bar. She was alone on a lip of rock above the empty cup of the world, and God thought it was funny and laughed, and there was really nothing to be done about it by anyone at all, not even a bald-headed It who meant to be kind.

The bartender thought wearily that this one was really the frosting on the cake. He’d seen a lot of wacky dames in his life, you met all kinds tending bar, but this one was worse than wacky. This one was meat for a psycho ward. Talking about God. Talking about the color of hair. Telling a guy he was lucky to have a head like an egg. He cursed softly and came around the bar to her side. He shook her gently.

“Look, lady. How about the coffee? The nice black coffee?”

She lifted her head and peered at him through tumbled hair of nameless color that looked brown. “Oh, yes. Fill up the cup with coffee. Fill up the empty cup of the world with hot black coffee.”

She slipped off the stool and sagged, and he supported her weight tiredly. “Easy, lady. Just take it easy. Just come along this way.”

He guided her back to the booth, and she sat down on the leather-covered seat and lay her head down on the table. He looked down at her and shook his head slowly from side to side and cursed again under his breath, wearily and bitterly and not without a certain compassion. Crazy-talking dame. Headed for a psycho ward, this one. Headed for the big break, God help her. There. She even had him thinking about God. He turned and went for the coffee.

She sat with her head on her arms and heard him move away, but she was not there in a real sense at all. Neither was she any longer on the lip of the world listening to the laughter of God. She was in the chair at the window above the roses, and she was listening to the harsh ringing of the telephone in the hall below.

The telephone rang in long, persistent bursts. She sat rigidly erect in the chair, thinking that she wouldn’t answer, but then, after the deliberate delay, she was up and running in darkness toward the door in a contrary fear that she would be too late to answer before the party at the other end hung up.

She took the call on the upstairs extension, and the party on the other end was a starched impersonal voice that asked if it was Miss Kathryn Gait speaking.

“Yes,” she said.

The starched voice identified itself as the General Hospital, as if it were an animated stack of stone and steel and mortar, and Kathy had a wild, random thought that if a hospital could really have talked, it would have talked with just such a voice. The voice said that Stella was an emergency case in the hospital. She had been brought in from the highway, where she had been involved in an accident. It would be advisable for Kathy to come at once.

She went. She left the phone uncradled and fled as she was down the stairs and outside, leaving open behind her the door through which Stella would not come again with one of her men, or her one man, neither tonight nor in a few days nor any time ever. The hospital was almost a mile across town, and she ran all the way, through light and darkness toward the terrible corollary to the answer to her prayer. In the hospital as she ran, without sound or portent or apparent consequence to earth, Stella died.

It was a long time before Kathy knew it. She sat in a cold white hall on the top floor of the hospital and waited. She sat on the edge of a straight chair with her torso and head held perfectly vertical and rigid from the hips and her knees and ankles together in the posture of a small, terrified girl trying valiantly to contain her terror. People in white went past her on rubber soles. Their feet made no noise, but their clothing whispered like brittle branches stirring in a winter’s wind. They didn’t look at her sitting there on the edge of the chair, didn’t seem to care that she had prayed to God to let a man die and that God had let the man die and would perhaps let Stella die, too. They didn’t care because they were meatless and soulless. You could tell by their soundless tread, their deathly pallor, their indifference to suffering and damnation.

She wondered why she couldn’t weep for release, but the bleak frigidity of the environment had permeated her flesh and frozen her blood, and so she sat mute and motionless. She tried to pray again, this time for life as she had prayed earlier for death, but she found that she couldn’t pray because she was now afraid of the whimsy of God. She could only sit rigidly and wait, and after a long time she was rewarded by the approach and owlish observation of a man in white. He was a man who was neither tall nor short, neither lean nor stout, an elusive mercurial impression of a man quite capable of presenting death without acquiring by association any color or permanence in her mind, so that she could never later remember what he looked like nor any material thing about him.

He introduced himself and said, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Miss Gait”

She looked at him and said nothing, and he added, “Your aunt is dead.”

Aunt? she thought. Whoever is he talking about? Whatever is an aunt? An aunt is a mother’s sister. Or a father’s sister. I had a mother once, and my mother had a sister, and her name is Stella. Stella? Can this odd man be talking about Stella? If so, he’s a liar. He’s a cruel, malicious liar. Certainly Stella couldn’t die. And if she could, it would be in a cloud of fire ascending to heaven and not in this ugly sterility scented with ether.

She swayed on the edge of the chair, catching herself in a second and resuming her rigid posture. She said in a remote voice, “I must see her.”

He peered at her closely. “Do you think that would be wise? Perhaps after a sedative and some rest...”

“I must see her now.”

“Very well.” He shrugged and turned. “If you will come this way, please.”

He took her to a closed door and opened it for her to pass through and from the doorway said after her, “Only for a minute, please. I’ll wait for you here.” Then he closed the door between them, and she was in a small white room with a narrow bed in it and on the bed under a sheet was what appeared to be a body, and there was apparently a rumor spreading that the body was Stella’s, which was ridiculous.

She walked over to the bed and pulled the sheet back off the face of the body, and it looked like Stella’s face, all right but it was made of wax. The lids were closed, and the lips were the bloodless lips of a dry wound that had obviously never known the sound and shape of laughter. This was no more than the final deception of a monstrous fraud, this waxen figure in the form of Stella, the final stroke of God’s cruel whimsy. She stood for several minutes looking down at the face, thinking that if this were really Stella she would surely feel more than she felt, should feel more than this even in response to a bitter joke — sadness or anger or anything at all instead of this strange, numb impotence.

Replacing the sheet, she turned and left the room, walking as she had sat on the chair in the hall, her head and torso rigidly perpendicular, as if she feared that excessive motion would topple her off balance. Passing the waiting doctor, she walked down the hall without pausing or speaking, and she didn’t respond when he spoke to her from behind. He asked her if she was all right, if she would like a bed to he down upon, but she made no sense of the words at all. Passing the elevator, she found the stairway and descended, leaving the hospital by the front entrance and walking down the broad concrete approach to the street.

She paused there under the trees, not so much wondering where to go as sensing, without ever giving specific thought to the sense, that there was really no place to go at all. Not home certainly. There was a reason, if she could think of it, why she couldn’t go home. Then she recalled that it was because Stella had gone away. Stella had gone away, and she had said that she wouldn’t be back for several days, and so it was, of course, impossible to go there until Stella returned. Why was that? She asked herself why it was, and she couldn’t quite find an answer. It had something to do with a man and a prayer and the unpredictable caprice of God.

The moon had vanished on its way around the earth. The earth continued on its way around the sun. Across the street, a sign said hamburgers.

She went across and into the all-night lunch counter and said, “Coffee, please.”

The waiter supplied it. He was fat, very fat, with three chins, and he could smell the ether on her. He thought that she looked like she was in a state of shock, and he thought that someone had died on her or was about to die on her, and he felt sorry for her, because he was a man of compassion.

Then she remembered that she had no money and stood up. “I have no money,” she said.

“Forget it,” he said. “Drink your coffee.” She sat down again, wondering if he would be so kind to her if he knew that she had just been punished by God. Looking down into the coffee cup, she faced the truth for the first time. She formulated the truth with her lips and put it into words. “Stella’s dead,” she said. Her breath stirred the surface of the coffee...