Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

“You got the page he wrote there?”

“Right here,” said Arthur.

“Lemme have a look it.”

“Wait’ll I wipe my hands here.” Having dried his hands, he took the paper from his breast pocket and handed it to his wife.

She read it carefully. “Well,” she said. “Only one thing to do.”

“That’s right,” said Arthur. “You want to or me?”

“I’ll,” said Rhoda, stepping to the gas range.

“Careful, dear,” cautioned Arthur. “Don’t burn yourself.”

“No, darling,” said his wife. She turned on the gas jet nearest her. The automatic monitor ignited the burner and Rhoda held a corner of the paper over it. She turned the jet off as the paper began to burn, neatly. Holding it before her she crossed the kitchen to the sink and joined her husband. Now she carefully placed the flaming handful in the sink. They both stood there, watching the paper turn to ash. Arthur put his arm around his wife, tenderly.

“It’s not like he couldn’t spare it,” he said.

“An’ anyways,” added Rhoda, “why cheat family and friends from paying proper last respects?”

“—crossed my mind, too,” said Arthur.

“Furthermore, he had no right to do what he did.”

“None whatsoever,” agreed Arthur. “A man legally dead, after all.”

“You know where we’re gonna sit tonight?” asked Rhoda.

“Loges.”

“Yes. Costly, but smoking.”

In the sink, the flame died. Rhoda slapped at the black ash, lightly, with her forefinger. Arthur turned on the faucet. Suddenly the sink was clear.

The undertaker and his wife washed their hands together and went to the movies. They arrived in time to see not only the newsreel and the cartoon, but Coming Attractions as well.

It is difficult to think about a Zenna Henderson story. When I pick it up and turn the pages to refresh my memory, the warm feeling comes back to me so strongly that it is next to impossible to remember that it is hunger she is writing about: the urgent crying hunger of human loneliness.

Most frequently, as here, she writes about children; a child struggling against society’s insistence that as the skullbones harden, the soul must be locked inside, alone. In the hands of another writer, these could be ugly stories; but I saved this one for the last, because it left me feeling so good. . . .

I suppose it was about the second week of school that I noticed Sue-lynn particularly. Of course, I’d noticed her name before and checked her out automatically for maturity and ability and probable performance the way most teachers do with their students during the first weeks of school. She had checked out mature and capable and no worry as to performance so I had pigeonholed her— setting aside for the moment the little nudge that said, “Too quiet”—with my other no-worrys until the fluster and flurry of the first days had died down a little.

I remember my noticing day. I had collapsed into my chair for a brief respite from guiding hot little hands through the intricacies of keeping a Crayola within reasonable bounds and the room was full of the relaxed, happy hum of a pleased class as they worked away, not realizing that they were rubbing “blue” into their memories as well as onto their papers. I was meditating on how individual personalities were beginning to emerge among the thirty-five or so heterogeneous first graders I had, when I noticed Sue-lynn—really noticed her—for the first time.

She had finished her paper—far ahead of the others as usual—and was sitting at her table facing me. She had her thumbs touching in front of her on the table and her fingers curving as though they held something between them—something large enough to keep her fingertips apart and angular enough to bend her fingers as if for corners. It was something pleasant that she held—pleasant and precious. You could tell that by the softness of her hold. She was leaning forward a little, her lower ribs pressed against the table, and she was looking, completely absorbed, at the table between her hands. Her face was relaxed and happy. Her mouth curved in a tender half-smile, and as I watched, her lashes lifted and she looked at me with a warm share-the-pleasure look. Then her eyes blinked and the shutters came down inside them. Her hand flicked into the desk and out. She pressed her thumbs to her forefingers and rubbed them slowly together. Then she laid one hand over the other on the table and looked down at them with the air of complete denial and ignorance children can assume so devastatingly.

The incident caught my fancy and I began to notice Sue-lynn. As I consciously watched her, I saw that she spent most of her free time staring at the table between her hands, much too unobtrusively to catch my busy attention. She hurried through even the fun-est of fun papers and then lost herself in looking. When Davie pushed her down at recess, and blood streamed from her knee to her ankle, she took her bandages and her tear-smudged face to that comfort she had so readily—if you’ll pardon the expression—at hand, and emerged minutes later, serene and dry-eyed. I think Davie pushed her down because of her Looking. I know the day before he had come up to me, red-faced and squirming.

“Teacher,” he blurted. “She Looks!”

“Who looks?” I asked absently, checking the vocabulary list in my book, wondering how on earth I’d missed where, one of those annoying wh words that throw the children for a loss.

“Sue-lynn. She Looks and Looks!”

“At you?” I asked.

“Well—” He rubbed a forefinger below his nose, leaving a clean streak on his upper lip, accepted the proffered Kleenex and put it in his pocket. “She looks at her desk and tells lies. She says she can see—”

“Can see what?” My curiosity picked up its ears.

“Anything,” said Davie. “It’s her Anything Box. She can see anything she wants to.”

“Does it hurt you for her to Look?”

“Well,” he squirmed. Then he burst out. “She says she saw me with a dog biting me because I took her pencil— she said.” He started a pell-mell verbal retreat. “She thinks I took her pencil. I only found—” His eyes dropped. “I’ll give it back.”

“I hope so,” I smiled. “If you don’t want her to look at you, then don’t do things like that.”

“Dern girls,” he muttered, and clomped back to his seat.

So I think he pushed her down the next day to get back at her for the dogbite.

Several times after that I wandered to the back of the room, casually in her vicinity, but always she either saw or felt me coming and the quick sketch of her hand disposed of the evidence. Only once I thought I caught a glimmer of something—but her thumb and forefinger brushed in sunlight, and it must have been just that.

Children don’t retreat for no reason at all, and though Sue-lynn did not follow any overt pattern of withdrawal, I started to wonder about her. I watched her on the playground, to see how she tracked there. That only confused me more.

She had a very regular pattern. When the avalanche of children first descended at recess, she avalanched along with them and nothing in the shrieking, running, dodging mass resolved itself into a withdrawn Sue-lynn. But after ten minutes or so, she emerged from the crowd, tousle-haired, rosy-cheeked, smutched with dust, one shoelace dangling, and through some alchemy that I coveted for myself, she suddenly became untousled, undusty and un-smutched.

And there she was, serene and composed on the narrow little step at the side of the flight of stairs just where they disappeared into the base of the pseudo-Corinthian column that graced Our Door and her cupped hands received whatever they received and her absorption in what she saw became so complete that the bell came as a shock every time.