Sideshow (8 page)

In Enarae, Zasper came to know all about Fringe Dorwalk. From a word dropped here and an implication there, from this tale and that recollection, Zasper managed to put her story together so that he felt he understood it. Perhaps, he told himself, it was part of his Enforcer’s habit, always to seek reasons for things. An Enforcer charged with Attending a Situation had to be able to judge what had caused the Situation, after all. Though perhaps, he admitted to himself, he was merely a snoopish old man who, having no family of his own,
let himself dig into the interstices of other people’s. Or, he admitted somewhat wryly, it could be that he simply cared about Fringe.
Whether it was fondness or mere curiosity, he did learn about her, and about her family, most notably her father, Char Dorwalk, scion of the Professional class. Professional wasn’t top class, not Executive, but it was far from trash, as Fringe told him, quoting her grandma Gregoria Dorwalk. Professional class was the good life, plenty of perks and not many risks, so Char had been born lucky. All he had had to do to have a good life, said Fringe, still quoting Grandma, was be sensible: set up in a profession, find a Professional-class spouse, and settle down.
“The way you say that, I guess he didn’t do it,” said Zasper.
No, she told him in Grandma Gregoria’s words, Char hadn’t been sensible. Char didn’t set himself up in a profession and pick a Professional wife. Instead, he picked a pretty little chirp of a Wage-earner woman who kept the books at the debt-slave market. Her name was Souile Troms, and as if Wage-earner class wasn’t bad enough, she was clerk caste to boot.
“Clerk caste isn’t
exactly
trash,” Fringe quoted Grandma Gregoria once more. “But when you get that low, you’re getting close.”
“Does your grandma always tell you anything that comes into her head?” Zasper asked, dumbfounded. “Including stuff about your ma?”
“Grandma says my ma is a perfectly nice woman,” Fringe explained with some surprise. “She just isn’t suitable for my pa.”
Zasper shook his head. “Didn’t your pa think she was suitable when he married her?”
“Oh, my pa! He was all in a fine fever of dedication, saying he’d draw her up to his level,” Fringe replied, quoting Grandma Gregoria once again. “Grandma told him he could draw Ma up all he liked, but what was he going to do about her family?”
“Her family?” asked Zasper.
“The Tromses,” said Fringe. “Ma’s ma and pa. They live with us. Their names are Nada and Ari.”
Further questioning by Zasper elicited that the Tromses were from the very bottom of the class structure, Trashers—
sometimes nicknamed Troughers, because they had their noses in the public trough. Souile Troms, born a Trasher, had done well to rise to Wage-earner class by her own efforts, but raising up her folks had been beyond her.
“If your ma wanted to marry Char, she should have left her folks behind,” Grandma Gregoria had said. “Her brother and sister went off and left them behind. Souile might have had a chance if she’d done that. I tried to tell my son, before he took them all in, but he wore me down. I finally told him to do whatever it was he was going to do. I couldn’t stop him, and after arguing and arguing, you get so tired you quit trying.”
Char had done what he wanted. Souile would not leave her parents behind, so Char had taken the setup money left by his father—every respectable Professional family provided funds to set up each child in a profession—had “invested” part of it, and with the rest bought a house large enough to hold them all plus the children he and Souile planned to have.
No house could be large enough for both Tromses, however. Their continual battles ranged from room to room and the smell of old Ari permeated any space he occupied. An hour after Nada and Ari moved into the room allocated to them, Nada moved out and into the space intended for children, which she had to herself until Fringe came along. Fringe had few memories of herself as a young child, but many impressions of that room, full of sniffles and groans and cries heard through the darkness.
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that! I’m your mother! Ah, my heart, my heart. When I’m lying dead, you’ll realize what you’ve done to me. Oh, help me to my bed. Let me lie down.”
“Ma’s dying, oh, Char, she’s dying, she says …”
Char’s voice, his dark-time voice, the one Fringe never heard in the light.
“She’s always dying. Never a day goes by she isn’t dying. So, let her die, if she’ll just let us alone. Will you all let me alone! Never any peace, no peace at all!”
“Hush, Char! Pa’ll hear you. All he wants is …”
“Let the filthy old fart have whatever he wants. I’m too tired to argue.”
“I guess Pa thought they’d all get along all right,” Fringe said to Zasper in the careless voice she always used when she talked about her family. “I guess it just didn’t work out.”
“Things like that often don’t work out,” said Zasper. “Despite good intentions.”
“Yeah,” mused Fringe.
“It takes a strong man to turn back from a bad choice.” This was Enforcer wisdom, hard-learned.
“Yeah,” said Fringe again, this time with a quick sidelong glance to say she’d noted that one down for future reference.
Certainly Char hadn’t turned back. Instead, he’d taken to spending most of his time away from the house. Nobody knew where he went or what he did. He wasn’t practicing a profession, that was certain. Rumors came that he was gambling. He did that a lot. Ma was gone most of the time too, but Fringe wasn’t supposed to ask where, and Nada wasn’t supposed to tell, even though she did tell in a shamed whisper: Souile was out earning money.
“We need it to buy food,” Nada whispered. “We need it to pay the school fees. But don’t tell your pa.”
“Grandma Gregoria says working for wages is disgraceful for a Professional-class person,” Fringe explained to Zasper. “Ma should go to the E&P Wives Club instead. She should go there and do acceptable activities.”
“E&P Wives Club? Acceptable activities?” asked Zasper. Though he’d been reared in Enarae, he didn’t recall hearing about acceptable activities.
“Acceptable activities, you know,” said Fringe. “Things your class says are acceptable. Like, if you’re a Trasher, you can gang-fight, but not if you’re a Professional. Professional women are supposed to go to the Executive and Professional Club and do women things. Wardrobe development. Conversation salon. Social dancing. History of Customs and Courtesy. E&P games. Acceptable activities. You know.”
Zasper’s Outcaste youth had been spent in activities that weren’t remotely acceptable, so he didn’t know, but he took her word for it.
Little girls, according to Fringe, learned about acceptable activities by playing with the E&P dolls their mothers gave them. E&P dolls had large wardrobes and extensive talk programs built right in.
“Tomorrow is the fifth of Springflower, Great Question Day,” a doll would say. “Everywhere on Elsewhere, people will consider the Great Question of man’s destiny. Here in Enarae red and gold are the traditional colors for Great Question Day. What will you wear?”
“…”
“We must all look our best for the festivities. I’ve done my
eyes a new way. They make me look lovely, don’t you think? Do you like the new way I’ve done my hair?”
“…”
“Do you suppose I’ll be picked for the promenade?”
“…”
Girls were supposed to fill in the blanks with conversation about grooming and style. That way, when they went to school and had conversation salon or grooming-and-style classes, they’d have a head start.
“At school they say we’re supposed to consider the Great Question,” said Fringe to Zasper, screwing up her mouth. “But nobody talks about the question at all. I mean, that could be kind of interesting, that question, about what mankind is for, but what we really do is play dolls. And all the dolls look alike. Exactly alike. They all have precisely the same face.”
Zasper noted her expression, which was of someone about to spit out something nasty. “Don’t you like them?” he asked innocently.
“I hate them,” said Fringe, who had always managed to break her dolls almost as soon as she got them, though she never exactly planned to. “Maybe if I had someone to play with. But Ma and Pa are always gone. And Grandma Nada is always dying.”
“Always?” asked Zasper.
“Well, every few days. Grandma Gregoria said she does it to keep in practice.”
“Who takes care of you and your brother.”
“Grandma Nada. When she isn’t dying.”
Certainly it was Nada who kept Fringe and Bubba fed and clothed. Sometimes Ari would come out of his reeking room and amuse them with wild tales of his ganger youth. By the time she was old enough for school, Fringe had picked up the Tromses’ attitudes and accents, their habits of speech, their habitual actions and responses to the actions of others; Nada’s defensiveness, Ari’s belligerence, the Tromses’ low-class vocabulary.
“Fringe talks like trash,” Grandma Gregoria said to Char, making a moue of distaste, either not knowing or not caring that nine-year-old Fringe was behind the door, listening and watching through a crack. “Your daughter talks like trash, Char. She’s low! And your son will be!”
The words shocked Fringe. She knew the two sides of the
family hated each other, but though the knowledge was painful, she hadn’t thought it had anything to do with her. Now, she realized she was mixed into it. She, Fringe, was right in the middle of it!
Shortly after the conversation between Grandma Gregoria and Pa, Bubba was sent away to a Professional-class boarding academy. Pa couldn’t have paid for the school, so Grandma Gregoria must have done it. Though Grandma Gregoria had a daughter and several granddaughters, Bubba was her only grandson.
Fringe wasn’t sent away, which meant she was all right as she was. Either that or it meant she wasn’t all right, but Pa just didn’t care.
“Do you suppose that could be it,” she whispered to Zasper. “He just doesn’t care?”
“Do you think about that a lot?” Zasper wanted to know.
She really didn’t. She tried not to think about it at all, or about the other stuff that went on. She found she could shut out the real world by pretending things inside her head. Sometimes she went for days not even noticing the real world. Except for some things.
Like the old woman who’d taken to following her around. Fringe thought between Grandma Gregoria and Nada, she had enough old women already, but this old woman kept showing up, here and there, not doing anything much, but sort of always there, a white-haired old thing with keen black eyes that seemed a lot younger than her face.
“Why do you always show up where I am?” Fringe asked her angrily, confronting her in the alley outside Bloom’s place.
“Do I?” asked the old thing. Today she was with a man almost as old as she was, and she looked at him with her head cocked to one side. “Do I show up where this child is?”
“I thought it was the other way ’round,” said the old man. “I thought this child was always appearing where we were.”
“There you have it,” said the old woman. “Contiguity does not prove causation.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re not necessarily following each other around.”
“I think she is, though,” said Fringe to Zasper. “Her name is Jory and I think she’s a spy.”
“For whom?” Zasper wanted to know. “Or what?”
Fringe couldn’t tell him. The only reason someone would
spy on her was if she was special for some reason. But she didn’t want to talk about being special. If you talked about things you wanted, or things you hoped for, somehow that fixed things so you never got them.
So, she changed the subject.
“Ma’s sick all the time now,” Fringe said.
“What kind of sick?” he asked, thinking he already knew.
“Just sick,” said Fringe.
These days Souile often lay abed with the horrors, glaring at the ceiling with wide, frantic eyes. The sickness came from near-lethal doses of mood-spray, but Souile never admitted that, not even to herself.
“Before I married Char, I saw my children in my mind,” Souile said to Fringe when Nada sent her with a bowl of hot broth. “You were never babies. You were always grown-up, poised and perfect. You moved like dancers. You were successful. You didn’t need anything from me. I knew you would be beautiful, and healthy and clever. I knew you would be talented and everyone would admire you, and me, because I was your mother. I thought if you were born Professional class, that’s all you’d ever need….”
“She said that, then she cried,” Fringe told Zasper, her eyes wide and ringed with shadows. “She threw the soup on the floor and cried, and she couldn’t get her breath, and I was afraid she was going to die.”
“What did you think about that?”
“I knew it was my fault.”
Zasper gave her a horrified stare. “Why would you think that?”
Fringe threw up her hands in a gesture learned at Grandma Gregoria’s knee. Why would she think that? Because she hadn’t done any of the things a good daughter should have done. She broke her dolls. She hadn’t learned to be classly. She hadn’t cared enough about style. She hadn’t learned to do conversation. She didn’t even know how to play the E&P games she was supposed to know.
“I’ve decided to take all the classes I’m supposed to,” she told Zasper desperately. “I’m going to do better.”
He didn’t say anything. He had never been a Professional-class child. He didn’t know what to say.
Fringe signed up for classes in conversation and personal style. She studied her fellow students, desperately intent on doing and saying the acceptable things, exhausting herself in
an effort to make sense of the seemingly pointless rituals. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t believe in them, she could not fit herself into the pattern. She tried to act the part, but she didn’t feel it. Some rebellious part of herself kept rearing itself up and sticking its tongue out, going nyah, nyah, nyah just when she had to concentrate!
Despite all her resolutions, she didn’t fit. She knew it and the Exec-class, Prof-class girls she was with knew it.
“Today one of the girls said I was crude,” she told Zasper in an expressionless voice. “She said I talk like a Trasher. She said I have no polish and my clothes don’t go together. She said I smell.”
“What did you do?”
What she had done had been without thought, without decision. It had just happened. “I hit her. Then I bit her.”
Sharp language, and sharper teeth (a Trasher trait, anger and fighting, learned from Ari). She’d known what the girl said was true though she had had no idea what to do about it or whether, if she had known, it would have been worth doing. She didn’t smell nearly as bad as Ari did.