A Handful of Time (17 page)

“What could you possibly do?”

“I don’t know. But I
can’t
go back and tell that dear creature our car pool doesn’t want her.”

“Stop
looking so intense. That’s what keeps you from being the boudoir-slip type. You always look as though you’re going out to break up a saloon or campaign for better Public Child Protection. The boudoir slip requires a languorous expression.”

“Phooey to looking languorous. And phooey to boudoir slips. I’d wear diapers to nursery school if you’d change your mind about taking along Hi-nin.”

“Would you wear a boudoir slip?”

“I‌—‌hell, yes.”

“And nothing else?”

“Only my various means of support. And my respectability.”

Regina laughed her tiger-on-the-third-Christian laugh. “What I want to find out,” she said, “is how you manage the respectability bit.”

It dawned on me while I was grinding the pepper for Clay’s salad that Regina had explained herself. All of a sudden I saw straight through her and I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. Regina
envied 
me.

Now on the face of it, that seemed unlikely. But it occurred to me that Regina’s parents had been the poor but honest and uneducated sort that simply are never asked to chaperone school parties. And the fact is that they were not what Regina thought of as respectable, though it never occurred to anyone but her that it mattered. And since all her culture was acquired after the age of thirteen, she felt it didn’t fit properly and that’s why she went out of her way to be arty-arty.

Whereas I took for granted all the things Regina had learned so painstakingly, and this in turn was what made me so irritatingly respectable.

As Regina had suggested, perhaps it
is
the expression on one’s face that makes the difference.

“Hey!” a cop yelled, pulling up as close to us as his rotors would allow. “What the hell?”

“I beg your pardon,” I said frigidly. It is very frigid in November if you are out in a helicopter dressed only in a boudoir slip.

“Look de bleesemans!” Gail cried.

“He might shoot everybody!” Billy warned.

Meli began to cry loudly. “He might
choot!
Ma-ma!”

“Pardon me, madam,” the cop said, and beat a hasty retreat.

When we landed on Hi-nin’s roof, Mrs. His-tara came up with him. She looked at me sympathetically. “You are perhaps molting, beloved friend?” Her large eyes retracted and filled with tears. “Such a season!”

“No‌—‌no, dear. Just‌—‌getting a little fresh air.”

I put Hi-nin on the front seat with me. He gave me a big-eyed, toothless smile and sat down in perfect quiet, except for the soft, almost sea sound of his breathing.

It was during one of those brief and infrequent silences we have that I noticed something was amiss. No sea sound.

I looked around to find Billy’s hands around Hi-nin’s throat.

“Billy!” I screamed.

“Aw!” he said, and let go.

Hi-nin began to breathe again in a violent, choked way.

“Billy,” I said, wondering if I could keep myself from simply throwing my son out of the helicopter, “Billy…”

“It is nothing, nice mama,” Hi-nin said, still choking.

“Billy.” I didn’t trust myself to speak any further. I reached around and spanked him until my hand was sore. “If you
ever
do that again‌—‌”

“Woa!”
Billy bawled. I’m sure he could be heard quite plainly by the men building the new astronomical station on the Moon.

I put Hi-nin on my lap and kept him there. “That’s just Billy’s way of making friends,” I whispered to him.

Under Billy’s leadership, several other children began to cry, and all in all it was not a well-integrated, love-sharing group that I lifted down from the heli at Playplace.

“The children always sense it, don’t they,” Mrs. Baden said with her gentle smile, “when we don’t feel comfortable about a situation?”

“Comfortable!”
I cried. It seemed to me the day had become blazing hot and I didn’t remember what I was dressed in until I tried to take off my jacket. “My son is an inhuman monster. He tried to‌—‌to‌—‌” I could feel a big sob coming on.

“Bite?” Mrs. Baden supplied helpfully.

“Strangle,” I managed to blurt out.

“We’ll be especially considerate of Billy today,” Mrs. Baden said. “He’ll be feeling guilty and he senses your discomfort about his aggression.”

“Senses
it! I all but tore him limb from limb! That dear little Hiserean child‌—‌”

“I do not want to be of difficulty,” Hi-nin said, tears pouring out of those great, big eyes.

Tears were pouring out of my small blue eyes by this time and Mr. Grantham, who brings a set of grandchildren, came by and patted my shoulder.

“Chin up!” he said. “Eyes front!”

Then he looked at his hand and my recently patted shoulder.

“Oh, excuse me,” he said. “Would you like to borrow my jacket?”

I shook my head, acutely aware, suddenly, that Mr. Grantham is not a doddering old grandfather but a young and handsome man. And all he thought about my bare shoulder was that it ought to be covered.

“You just run along,” Mrs. Baden said. “We’ll let Billy strangle the pneumatic dog and everything will be just fine. Oh, and dear‌—‌I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it‌—‌you don’t have on a dress.”

I went home and sat in front of the mirror feeling miserable in several different directions. If Regina Raymond Crowley appeared in public dressed only in a boudoir slip, people would think all sorts of wicked things. When I appeared in public in a boudoir slip, everybody thought I was just a little absentminded.

This, I thought, is a hell of a thing to worry about. And then I thought, Oh, phooey. If even I think I’m respectable, what can I expect other people to think?

I took down the note on the mirror about Regina. No wonder I didn’t like her! I turned the paper over and wrote “Phooey to me!” with my eyebrow pencil.

I was still regarding the note and trying to argue myself into a better mood when Clay came tramping down from work at three o’clock.

“Why are you sitting around in a boudoir slip?” he asked.

“You’re a double-dyed louse and a great, big alligator head,” I told him.

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Where’s Billy?”

“Taking his nap. Tell me the truth, Clay. The absolute truth.”

Clay looked at me suspiciously. “I’d planned on a little golf this afternoon.”

“This won’t take a minute. I don’t ask you things like this all the time, now do I?”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I took a deep breath. “Clay, is there anything about me, anything at all, that is not respectable?”

“There is
not
…”
he said.

“Well‌—‌I guess that’s all there is to it,” I sighed. I pulled off my boudoir slip and got a neat paper one out of the slot. “Anyway,” I said bravely, “boudoir slips have to be laundered.”

Clay looked at me curiously for a moment and then said, “This looks like a good afternoon to go play golf.”

“Do you think there’s anything not respectable about Regina Crowley?”

“There is
everything
not respectable about Regina Crowley,” Clay said vehemently.

“You see?”

“Frankly, no.”

“Well, do you think her husband uses that tone of voice when he says, There is
everything
respectable about Verne Barrat?’
 
”

“I don’t know why he should say that at all.”

“She might ask him.”

“Darling, you’re mad as a hatter,” Clay said, kissing me good-by.

“Do you really think so?”

“Of course not,” Clay roared as he tramped up the steps to the heli.

About nine o’clock the next morning I heard a heli landing on the roof and I thought, Now who? There was much tooting, and when I went up, Regina practically threw Hi-nin at me.

“I told you so,” she snapped at me. Her face was burning red and she wasn’t bothering to tilt her nose.

“What happened? Why did you bring him back to
me?”

“His hand,” she said, and took off.

Hand? He was holding one hand over the other. No! I grabbed his hands to see what it was.

One hand had obviously been bitten off at the wrist. He was holding the wound with the tentacles of his other little boneless hand. There was very little blood.

“It is as nothing,” he said, but when I cradled him in my arms, I could feel him shaking all over.

“It will grow back,” he said.

Would it?

I took him in the heli and held him while I drove. I could feel him trying to stop himself from shaking, but he couldn’t.

“Does it hurt very much?” I asked.

“The pain is small,” he said. “It is the fear. The fear is terrible. I am unable to swallow it.”

I was unable to swallow it, too.

“The hand,” said Mrs. His-tara without concern, “will grow back. But the things within my son…” She, too, began to tremble involuntarily.

“Billy,” I began, feeling the blood come through my lower lip, “Billy and I are…” It was too inadequate to say it.

“It was not Billy,” Hi-nin said without rancor. “It was Gail.”

“Gail! Gail doesn’t bite!” But she had, and I broke down and plain cried.

“Do not trouble yourself,” said Mrs. His-tara. “My son receives from this a wound that does not heal. On Hiserea he would be forever sick, you understand. On your world, where everyone is born with this open wound, it will be his protection. So Mrs. Baden warned me and I think she is wise.”

As soon as I got home, I called up Regina. She looked pale and lifeless against the gaudy, irresponsible objects in the art shop.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said quickly. “I can’t drive and watch the children at the same time. I told you the children would eat…” She stopped, and for the first time I saw Regina really horrified with herself.

“Nobody said it was your fault. But don’t you think you could have taken Hi-nin home yourself? To show Mrs. His-tara that‌—‌I don’t know what it would show.”

It reminded me, somehow, of the time Regina stepped on a lizard and left it in great pain, pulling itself along by its tiny front paws, and I had said, “Regina, you can’t leave that poor thing suffering,” and she had said, “Well, I didn’t step on it on purpose,” and I had said, “Somebody’s got to kill it now,” and she had said, “I’ve got a class.” I could still feel the crunch of it under my foot as its tiny life went out.

“Sorry, Verne,” she said, “you got yourself into this,” and hung up.

That night Regina called me. “Can you give blood?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “If I stuff myself, I can get the scales up to a hundred and ten pounds.”

“What type?”

“B. Rh positive.”

“Thought you told me that once. Gail is in the hospital. They have to replace every drop of blood in her body. She may die anyhow.”

I thought of the little fluff and squeak that was Gail. I eat de crus’ of de toas’.

“What’s the matter with her?” I asked fearfully.

“That damn Hiserean child is
poison.
Gail had a little cut inside her mouth from where she fell off the slide at school.”

“I’ll be at the hospital in ten minutes,” I said, and hung up shakily. “Dinner is set for seven-thirty,” I told Clay and Billy, and rushed out.

The first person I saw at the hospital was not Regina. It was Mrs. His-tara.

“How did you know?” I asked. Her integument was dull now and there were patches of scales rubbed off. Her eyes were almost not visible.

“Mrs. Crowley called me,” she said. “In any case I would have been here. There is in Hi-nin also of poison. There remains for him only the Return Home. We must rejoice for him.”

The smile she brought forth was more than I could bear.

“Gail’s germs were poison to him?”

“Oh, no. He poisons himself. It is an ancient hormone, from the early days of our race when we had what your Mrs. Baden so wisely calls aggression. It is dormant in us since before the accounting of our history. An adult Hiserean, perhaps, could fight his emotions and cure himself. Hi-nin has no weapons‌—‌so your physicians have explained it to me, from our scientific books. How can I doubt that they are right?”

How could I doubt it, either? It would be, I thought, rather like a massive overdose of adrenalin. Psychogenic, of course, but what help was it to know that? Would there be some organ in Hi-nin a surgeon could remove? Like the adrenals in humans, perhaps?

Of course not. If they could have, they would have.

I hurried on to find the room where Gail was. She was not pale, as I had expected, but pink-cheeked and bright-eyed. They were probably putting in more blood than they were taking out. There were two of the other mamas from our car pool, waiting their turns.

Rejgina was sitting by the bed, her face ugly and swollen from crying.

“She looks just fine!”
I exclaimed. “Only in the last fifteen minutes,” she said. “When I called you, she was like ice. Her eyes didn’t move.”

“We’re lucky with Gail. Did you know about Hi-nin?”

“The little animal!” she said. “He’s the one that did it.”

“He didn’t do anything, Regina, and you know it.”

“He shouldn’t have been in the car pool. He shouldn’t be with human children at all.”

“He’s going to die,” I said quickly, before she had time to say things she’d have nightmares about later on.

“Sorry,” Regina said, because we were all looking at her and because her child was pink and beautiful and healthy while Hi-nin…

“Regina,” I said, “what did you do after it happened?”

“Do!
It scared the hell out of me‌—‌that creature shaking all over and Gail screaming. At first I didn’t know what had happened. Then I saw that
thing
flopping around on the front seat and I screamed and threw it out of the window. And then I noticed Hi-nin’s wrist, or whatever you call it. I said, ‘Oh, God, I
knew
you’d get us in trouble!’ But the creature didn’t say anything. He just sat there. And I let the other children off and brought Hi-nin to you because I didn’t want to get involved with that Mrs. Baden.”