What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(51)
The poison taster is feeling a bit ill. He’s well paid but he hates his master so much that today, the day he finally tasted poison, he’s eaten a lot and is managing to keep a normal expression on his face until his master has eaten at least as much as he has. Eat heartily, boss, don’t stop now . . .
Who’s a homely wench? Luca is, and Day is, and so are Pepper and Thalia and Hilde and Willa and anyone who is not just content to accept an invitation but wants more people to join the party, more and more and more. Day can just hear Pepper and Luca climbing up onto a tabletop at such a party and screaming out (they’d have to scream through megaphones, as she’s envisioning a gathering that’d fill Rome’s Coliseum many times over): Hello everyone, it’s great to see you all, you homely beasts and wenches.
Send.
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THE HOMELY WENCHES have no fixed headquarters, and all the members agree that this keeps them humble, relying as they do on the soft furnishings and snack-based offerings of whichever member is host to Wench meetings for the month. February was Day’s month for hosting meetings, and this particular meeting had been called to discuss articles for the Lent term edition of The Wench. There were to be two interviews: one with a bank robber who’d turned down a place at Cambridge and now half regretted it. Marie was covering that story; she had a feeling for bittersweet regret and mercenary women. The other interview was with Myrna Semyonova, author of a novel, Sob Story, which she’d written to make her girlfriend laugh, consisting as it does of a long, whisky-soaked celebration of all the mistakes two male poets (one young, one middle-aged) had made and were making in their lives. The narrator of the novel was the bar the two poets drank at, and since Semyonova had published the book under the pen name Reb Jones she was hailed as the new Bukowski. Willa was covering that, and her reaction to Sob Story’s being taken so seriously was the same as that of Semyonova’s girlfriend: It made the joke twice as funny. Ed was working on a piece about hierarchies of knowledge for female love interests in the early issues of her favorite comic books; how very odd it must be to operate within a story where you’re capable, courageous, droll, at the top of your field professionally and yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero who saves your life at night. “Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to the idea that the woman whose attention you can’t get just can’t see ‘the real you,’ no?”
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DAY LOOKED FROM face to face. Marie might get on with Thalia; they both favored grave formality and never letting a single hair fall out of place, though Marie’s Zaire French accent and her tendency to wear jackets over her shoulders without putting her arms in the sleeves gave her attitude more impact than Thalia’s. The society was too small to have a leader, but if they’d had one, Marie would’ve been it. Sometimes, when Marie and Willa spoke together in French, glancing around as they did so, Day felt that they were disparaging her mode of dress, but Ed had reassured her that that was just how people who could only speak English naturally responded to fluent French speakers. Ed, named after Edwina Currie, was much easier to get to know. You could chat to her about anything. If she didn’t understand a reference you made she just said so. Rare, very rare for anyone Day had met at Cambridge to admit to gaps in their understanding . . . but Ed would ask to hear more. This puckish, boyish young woman was black like Marie and a Londoner like Willa, but, as she put it herself, “a different kind of black, and a different kind of London”—it was hard to picture a time, place, or opportunity other than university and the Homely Wench Society for the likes of Ed, Willa, and Marie to find out that they really got on. For one thing all three had a tendency to assume that everybody else was joking all the time and responded accordingly—Willa with breezy levity, Marie with frank disappointment, Ed with various micro-expressions, semi-smiles, really, that made you want to laugh too, even if you really did mean what you’d just said.
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THEO AND HILDE, on the other hand, didn’t think anybody was joking about anything unless they were explicitly told so. Theodora Ackner, Nebraska’s finest, was still disconcerted by Europe’s ghosts. Hilde, Ed, and Grainne could no longer hear them, but the ghosts seemed to wake up again around Theo, since she actively listened for them. Lisbon, Paris, and Vienna were tough places for her, beauties clotted with blood. Hilde refused to accompany Theo to Oslo. “About a quarter of my family lives there, Theodora. Let me know these things in my own way.”
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AND THEN THERE was Grainne Molloy, who had lobbied to be recorded in the annals of the Homely Wench Society as “the irrepressible” Grainne Molloy, unsuccessfully, since, as Hilde pointed out: “Sometimes you are repressible, though.” While Grainne did truly lose her temper several times a day, that frenetic energy of hers occasionally served to obscure another trait: the cool and calculated collection of incriminating anecdotes.
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THE NEWEST HOMELY WENCH was half in love with every single one of her fellow Wenches, but she wasn’t sure what she, Dayang, brought to the mix. She’d been a member for just over three months and hadn’t had an idea for an article or a group activity yet. She snapped the group photos so she wouldn’t have to see physical proof of her being odd man out. Maybe she could do something toward recruitment; a few of her friends from college and faculty had seemed interested when she mentioned the Wenches.