Household Gods Read online

  Times were simpler then. They had to have been better. How could they possibly have been worse?

  She trudged back to the kitchen. Justin, gymnast extraordinaire, had succeeded in standing up on the seat of his high chair. Just as she caught sight of him, he set himself up for a swan dive to the floor. Nicole caught him with a grab that would have made a big-league center fielder jealous.

  “I think you’re done,” she said. Amazing how calm she sounded — she had to be numb. “Go play quietly in your room and let me finish eating my dinner.” Maybe that would buy her the five minutes’ peace she’d prayed for in the morning. She hadn’t got it then. She didn’t honestly expect to get it now.

  No more than a minute and a half later, Justin was in the front room pestering Kimberley. Most of the time, Kimberley could take care of herself, but not when she was laid flat with a virus. Nicole charged to the rescue, to find her daughter halfway toward falling asleep, and Justin trying to wake her up by shoving a toy truck in her face. Nicole laid down the law to him, which wasn’t easy when she was trying to be quiet and not disturb Kimberley. She doubted it was sinking in. Two-year-olds paid even less attention to the laying down of the law than some juries did.

  By the time the credits rolled on the Toy Story tape, Kimberley had dozed off. She hardly stirred when Nicole picked her up and carried her to bed. It was well before her usual bedtime, but Nicole didn’t worry about that. If her daughter got a long night’s sleep, she might be close to her old self in the morning. Kids got sick in a hurry, but sometimes they got well in a hurry, too.

  Justin wasn’t used to being up when his big sister was asleep. He took one of Kimberley’s Barbies and tried to fracture its skull on the coffee table. Nicole looked on with benign approval. She would never have given Barbies to Kimberley: they sent all the wrong messages. The damn dolls were Frank’s fault. What was worse, and what worried Nicole most, was that Kimberley liked them far too much to make it worth her mother’s while to confiscate them.

  “The minute they’re born, they’re trapped in gender roles,” Nicole muttered.

  Justin looked up from his mayhem, distracted by the sound of her voice but not curious to know what she meant. Nicole smiled at him. Justin whacked happily away at the coffee table. “Wham! Wham!” he shouted.

  “Beat her brains out, kid,” Nicole said. The doll, she thought with malicious glee, looked a little like Dawn.

  After he’d worked out all of his hostility and some of Nicole’s, too, Justin went to bed with no more than a token protest. Nicole took a shower, pulled on a clean pair of designer sweats — Neiman-Marcus this time, with blocks of pure strong color, blue and hot pink and acid yellow, as if she could brighten her mood forcibly by livening up her color scheme — and scowled at the telephone. She didn’t think Frank had classes on Wednesdays this quarter. If he didn’t, he could take the kids, and she wouldn’t have to burn a vacation day riding herd on them.

  When the hour crawled past nine o’clock and he still hadn’t called, she called him again. Again, she got Dawn on the answering machine. This time, she tried to be more civil. She didn’t know how well she succeeded.

  Ten o’clock rolled by. The telephone stayed obstinately silent. Shaking her head, Nicole went into the study and turned on the computer. She used America Online just often enough to keep from quitting the service. One reason she hadn’t quit was times like this. Frank might take too long to answer telephone messages, but he was religious about replying to e-mail the minute he saw it.

  As soon as she logged on to AOL, a bright electronic voice announced, “You’ve got mail!” Nicole blinked. People didn’t send her e-mail all that often; the ones who knew she was on line also knew the mail might sit in her box for a couple of weeks before she saw it.

  What the hell, she’d read it before she sent her own.

  There was only one letter. It was from Frank, from his UCLA Internet address, and sent that afternoon. In the way of e-mail, it was short and to the point: The reason I can’t take the kids tomorrow is that Dawn and I are leaving for three weeks in Cancun tonight, so you might as well stop bugging me for a while, all right? I won’t be around to listen to it.

  Nicole stared at the screen. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You can’t pay child support, but you and Ms. Dumb-Blonde can bop off to Mexico any time you feel like it? You son of a bitch.”

  She logged off in controlled fury and shut down the computer. No point to sending e-mail now. Frank was off to sunny Mexico, Frank and Dawn and — god damn her — Josefina, though even in a well-nurtured rage Nicole couldn’t imagine Josefina doing the sights in Cancun with a pair of irredeemably Anglo tourists. Frank didn’t give a damn what happened back here in smoggy L.A. That was Nicole’s job. Women’s work. Sit at home mopping up puke and scouring Teddy Grahams out of kitchen tiles, while the big brave man went gallivanting off to play.

  She trudged back into the bedroom. Time was when it had been a sanctuary, a place she’d made for herself after Frank left. She’d hauled the curtains and the comforter and the rest of the bedroom accessories off to Goodwill, got the dresser and the bedside tables refinished, dumped the king-sized waterbed that took sheets the size of Alaska, and bought herself a nice brass bed with a queen-sized mattress. She’d even painted the walls, got rid of the old ugly peach enamel in favor of a nice flat oyster white. She’d been proud of it then, determined to make it a new beginning: Nicole Gunther-Perrin, independent woman.

  Now the bold Aztec print of the comforter was crumpled and dingy and flung half on the floor. The sheets still matched, but hadn’t been changed in a week. Justin had tried to climb the drapes and pulled the whole thing down, double rod and all. The window was naked but for the Venetian blinds that she’d used to open to let the daylight in, but she hadn’t done that since she could remember.

  Not that, at the moment, there was any daylight to let in. If she bothered to look out, she’d see a dark stretch of yard and the fence that divided it from the neighbors’ swimming pool. She was glad the fence was good and strong and high, to keep the babies safe. She hadn’t had to have it built; just about all L.A. backyards were fenced, which still struck her as strange.

  Both of Nicole’s babies were as safe as they could be, when their father had walked out on them and their mother had just been bilked of a partnership. She and Frank had planned to put in a pool themselves later, when the kids were past the drowning stage. Now they’d never do it. The yard was a nondescript patch of dirt with a sunburnt swingset and a sandbox that Kimberley and Justin could turn into a battlefield. These days, they never got to use it. They were always either at daycare or doing weekend visitations with Frank and Dawn.

  It was all dark now, invisible. Nicole turned back to the disheveled bedroom. An impulse struck, to straighten up, make the bed, dust the tables and the dresser, pick up the scattered clothes and the pile of assorted shoes. Before she could start, a glance at the bedside clock changed her mind for her. Ten thirty-eight at night was no time to make her bed for the day.

  She settled for shaking out the sheets and the blanket and pulling the comforter straight. It was an absurd thing to do, anal and rather pathetic, but at least she’d crawl into a more or less orderly bed. Sleep didn’t enter into it. She was wide awake, almost painfully so.

  Well, and who cared? With Kimberley sick, with Josefina off to Mexico, and with her louse of an ex-husband off to Mexico, too, she could sleep as late as the kids would let her. Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng would have to do without her services tomorrow — not that they’d shown much enthusiasm for said services. The kind they really wanted, the bend-over-and-take-it kind, she would not provide.

  Her eye fell again as it so often did, on the one thing in the room that wasn’t Yuppie Eclectic Chic. Liber and Libera stood in their stone calm, clasped hand in hand, staring gravely out at a world they couldn’t ever have imagined, let alone created. They wouldn’t have stood for the crap that had landed on h
er today. How could they, with names like theirs? Nothing in their world or time had been as purely awful as this one she lived in.

  She rested her hand on the votive plaque. It felt cool and smooth, inert but somehow subtly alive, the way carved stone can be when it’s very old. “I wish I’d lived then, ‘ she said. “It would have been a good time to be alive, not so… artificial as it is now. Not so hateful.”

  She squeaked in surprise. Her hand jerked itself away from the plaque. She stared at the palm. It couldn’t be — of course it couldn’t — but it felt as if it had been blessed with a pair of tiny kisses.

  Had Liber and Libera smiled quite so broadly before? Of course they had. They must have. She was tired. She was stressed out. She was imagining things wholesale.

  She shook out the comforter again, for luck as it were, and to clear her own head; then climbed into bed. She hesitated as she reached to turn out the light. The lamp’s glow fell softly on the gods’ smiling faces. Her palm itched a little, and stung a little, as if it had had a tiny — doubled — electric shock. She shook her head firmly, steeled herself, and flicked out the light. Dark came down abruptly. Sleep came down with it, too fast almost to perceive. The last thing she remembered was a kind of dim astonishment.

  In the dark, quiet bedroom, on the old, old plaque, Liber turned his head and smiled at Libera. She smiled back. Excitement sang between them. True, it was true. A prayer at last; a votary; a wish so strong, it had roused them from their sleep. How long it had been? Hundreds of years — a thousand, and half a thousand more. Bacchus, that simpering Greek, had never lacked for either prayers or devotees. Liber and Libera had been all forgotten.

  And such an easy prayer to answer, though not — they admitted to each other — as strictly usual as most. Most prayers were for wealth or fertility or escape from the morning-after price wine inevitably exacted. Such a wish as this: how wonderfully novel, and how simple, too. Nicole had traveled to Carnuntum. This plaque, on which Liber and Libera’s power was now so singularly focused, had come from that ancient city. And, best of all, when the plaque was made, a woman of Nicole’s blood and line had been living in Carnuntum. Is it not wonderful? they said to one another. Is it not meant? Is it not a beautiful symmetry, as beautiful as we are ourselves?

  What pleasure, too, in granting the prayer; what divine and divinely ordained ease. This woman’s spirit was as light as thistledown, for all its leaden weight of worry. Purest simplicity to waft it out of the flesh, to send it spiraling down the long road into that other, kindred body.

  Such lovely days, those had been, so much more delightful than these, which were nothing if not dull. How perceptive of this woman to comprehend it, and how ingenious of her to utter a prayer they could grant.

  Because she was so clever a child of men, and because they were, in their stony hearts, as generous as gods can sometimes choose to be, they granted her spirit a gift. As it spun backward through the years, they instructed it in the language that mortal men had spoken then, the beautiful Latin that was so little like the harsh barbaric rattle of its native English. It had not thought, silly thing, to ask; but how else could it share fully in those lively times, those vivid and brightly sunlit years before the world grew gray and old?

  After all, they assured each other, they were granting her every wish, both expressed and unexpressed. They could do no less for their first worshipper in so many hundred years. Our blessing on you, they called after the swiftly flitting spirit. May all gods keep you, and prosper you, and give you joy.

  Nicole’s dreams were strange. She rode a spiral through the dark. Spiral dance? Spiral galaxies? — No: a helix, for she went down, backward, as well as round and round. Damn, what did that remind her of? It was dim, shadowed, fluxing in and out of her perception. And yet…

  There. She grasped it and held on tight, before it slipped away again. She’d seen it on TV. Watson and Crick. The Double Helix.

  DNA — that was it. Building block of life. Ascending chain of being. Descending stair of existence. She could feel the rungs under her feet, the gravity that drew her down and down, round and round.

  She’d never dreamt such a dream before. She’d never been so aware of dreaming, either. Would she remember when she woke? Usually, she didn’t want to. This wasn’t frightening, nor particularly weird as dreams went. It was interesting. Words flitted past her, whispers, murmurs in a language she didn’t know, yet felt — strangely — that she did. How odd, she thought in passing. How wonderful. How deliciously strange.

  Maybe after all it was the waking she wouldn’t want to remember. Maybe she wanted to stay inside the dream. She’d dream it to the hilt. She promised herself that, far down the spiral stair, the endlessly turning helix of her own and only self.

  3

  Still dreaming but starting to swim out of the long spiraling dark, Nicole rolled over in her bed.

  The mattress was lumpy. Her eyelids were still asleep, but her brain roused slowly, taking count of the individual senses. Yes — there were lumps under her. Hard ones. She hissed. Damn those kids! They knew the rule. No hiding toys in Mommy’s bed. Whichever one had done it, it was going to cost. Early bedtime for Kimberley, no Teddy Grahams for -

  She drew in a deep, would-be calming breath. Her eyes flew open. She gasped, gagged, almost puked all over the bedclothes. Jesus Christ! What a stink! The last time she’d smelled anything even close to this bad, the septic tank had backed up at Cousin Hedwig’s house in Bloomington. But this was a richer, more complex odor, compounded of sewage and barnyard and city dump and locker room and apartment-house fire. It was a stench with character, a stench to be respected and admired, even a stench to be savored. If you were going to build a stench to order, these were the specs for the very finest, luxury model.

  It was such a stench, in fact, that for a couple of seconds her nose overwhelmed her eyes. Even as she decided that a garbage truck must have overturned on the front lawn, she realized something more immediately important.

  This wasn’t the room she’d gone to bed in, or any room she remembered, anytime, anywhere.

  Wan daylight seeped in through a wood-framed window. There was no glass, only wooden shutters thrown back. Flies danced in the shaft of pale light and buzzed through the room: the window had no screen, either. An enormous hairy black fly landed on the wall near the bed and perched there, rubbing its hands together. The wall was roughly plastered and even more roughly whitewashed. Dark spots here and there suggested that a good many flies had met their death on it.

  Aside from the bed, the room was sparsely furnished. A battered chest of drawers stood against one wall, its yellowish pine looking as if it had been the victim of an amateur refinisher. There was no chair, only a pair of stools like — well, like milking stools; they were more or less that shape and about that size. No TV. No photos of kids; no radio, no alarm clock, no lamp on the nightstand. For that matter, no nightstand. No closet, either. Just the bare box of a room and narrow lumpy cot of a bed and the chest and the stools.

  On the chest sat a pitcher, a two-handled cup, and a bowl, all of pottery glazed the same gaudy red as the sticks of sealing wax Nicole had affected in her brief but passionately romantic phase, between thirteen and thirteen and a half.

  Terra sigillata, she thought. The words shouldn’t have made any sense to her; she knew she’d never known them before. And yet she knew what they meant: sealing-wax ware. That was the name for the crockery on the chest.

  A lamp squatted next to the bowl. Another sat on a stool. She’d seen the genie emerging from one just like them in Aladdin. But Aladdin’s lamp had been bronze or brass or something like that. These were plain unglazed clay.

  Nicole sat up carefully, as if her head might rock and fall off her shoulders. She wasn’t hung over: she didn’t drink. She wasn’t on anything — no drugs, prescription or otherwise. She might be dreaming, but she could never have dreamt that monumental stink. Which only left -

  “I’ve gone crazy,
” she said.

  Sitting up, she could see the floor. It was no more reassuring than any of the rest of it. No beige shag carpeting here, only bare, well-rubbed boards. Carefully, almost fearfully, she ventured to look up. Boards again. Rough boards, and low, too.

  She couldn’t, quite, touch the ceiling, but she could brush her hand across the blanket that covered her. She remembered vividly, distinctly, the touch and feel of her own comforter, its soft down-filled thickness, the faintly wilted but crisp and brightly printed cotton. Its pattern was called Cinnabar. She’d admired the colors when she bought it, deep green to match her eyes, rich dark purple, terracotta, and a touch of red and gold. This wasn’t her comforter. It was a blanket, rough wool worn thin and threadbare, dyed a sad, faded blue.

  She itched just looking at it. She scrambled it away from her, thrusting it aside with a hand that -

  A hand that — was not her hand.

  The fingers twitched when she told them to twitch. The arm lifted when her mind said Lift. But it was not her arm. She knew what her arm looked like. How could she not know what —?

  She throttled down hysteria. Look, she thought. Look at it. Study it. Make sense of it.

  It wasn’t her arm. It was thinner — a great deal thinner. There were muscles on it, hard ropy muscles, no softness, no deskbound flab. Her arm was smooth-skinned and round and dusted with pale blond hairs, not these rougher and thicker dark ones. The skin was darker, too; not the darkness of a California tan but a warmer olive tone that had to be its natural shade. There was a scar above the wrist, a good two inches long. She had no scars, not on her arms.

  This was not her arm. Nor her hand. Her hands were smooth, the nails filed and rounded and painted a light and unobtrusive shell-pink.

  This was — these were, as the right emerged from the blanket to join the left — battered, callused. The nails were short and ragged. They had black dirt ground in under them. If these hands had ever seen a nail-file or an emery board, let alone a bottle of nail polish, it hadn’t been in years.