Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

Duncan looked stricken. “C’est terrible,” he cried. “How will we have any fun without you?” Last summer, someone had told Duncan he looked like Marc Bolan. Since then, he’d affected a ridiculous accent along with Yardley midnight blue eyeliner. “C’est impossible —”

“Oh, try.” I licked my finger and wiped a blue smudge from his cheek. “God, you’re a mess, Dunc. See you—”

I hurried to where Hillary’s decrepit car was parked beneath a tree. Ali and Jamie stood sharing a cigarette, while Hillary swiped yellow leaves from the windshield.

“You always lived here?” Jamie dropped the cigarette. We all nodded. “Man, I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“It’s not so bad.” Hillary slid into the front seat and began sorting through a pile of eight-tracks, adding, “You just need the right attitude. ”

“And a ton of money,” said Ali as she swung in beside Hillary. “And good teeth.”

“Fuck that. This place creeps me out.”

Ali looked bemused. “Deer Park?”

“No. This town —” Jamie got into the back, rolled down his window and stared to where Muscanth Mountain rose above us, mist lifting slowly from its slopes. “It’s weird. I don’t like it.”

I clambered in beside Jamie, pushing empty beer cans onto the floor. The eight-track roared on with considerably more power than the car, blasting Slade as we bellied slowly out of the lot.

“You’re up at Kern’s place, right?” yelled Hillary.

Jamie hunched down in the seat. “Yeah.”

We drove back into town, turning off Kinnicutt and onto the labyrinthine road that wove through the village and then up Muscanth Mountain. The dying sun cast a milky haze over the rough contours of the surrounding hills and forest. A kind of light I have only ever seen in Kamensic in autumn, light like powder shaken onto the landscape, mingled gold and green and a very pale opalescent blue. The air smelled sweet and slightly rotten. The old houses and ramshackle mansions took on a detached glamour, their stones and clapboards softened by a golden haze of oak leaves, the neglected lawns smoothed by distance. Pumpkins sat at the end of driveways alongside sheaves of corn, and on the front doors appeared those idiosyncratic emblems of Halloween in Kamensic—ugly little terra-cotta masks with gaping eyes and mouths, hung by bits of coarse twine. Crude versions of the traditional masks of comedy and tragedy, they appeared every year at the end of September in the Scotts Corners Market, along with jugs of cider and ornamental gourds and coils of hempen rope. Cub Scouts and the League of Women Voters sold the masks and donated the money to the volunteer fire department. I never knew where the masks came from. They were heavy lumpen things, with dried clay coils for hair and clumsy, almost primitive features—a tiny depression to indicate the nose, hollow eyes, gashed mouths. I hated them. They embarrassed me, and in some strange way they frightened me, too. Once at the Courthouse Museum I asked Mrs. Langford what they were for—

“Well, they’re for Halloween,” she said, frowning. She reached for her thermos of black currant tea spiked with sloe gin, poured herself a cupful, and sipped. “Just a local custom, that’s all. To show our allegiance to the gods, you know.”

And she fingered the brooch she wore on her breast, a pair of beautifully figured masks of gold. One mouth curved into a delicate smile; the other was less a frown than a grimace. No one would ever tell me more than that, nor why the masks were never saved from one year to the next but instead were broken.

“That is an idiotic superstition,” Hillary yelled once at his mother. This was a year or two earlier, when we were fifteen and Hillary facetiously wore a NIXON’S THE ONE! button to school every day. Natty stood in their backyard wielding a hammer and a mask wrapped in a tea towel, surrounded by neatly raked piles of leaves and burlap sacks.

“Oh, hush, Hillary,” she said impatiently. “Oooh, I hate this—” She winced and brought the hammer down. There was a muted crunch. The towel opened like a blossom, spilling shards of broken terra-cotta.

“Then why do you do it?” Hillary demanded.

“It’s good for the soil. Good drainage.” She began gathering the pieces into the towel, humming. “Hand me that basket, will you, dear?”

“Not until you tell me why,” Hillary insisted. “You don’t go to church, you don’t even vote —why do you mess around with those stupid masks?”

Natty ran a hand across her face, leaving a trail of dirt. “Oh, Hillary.” She turned and set the broken mask on the stone wall. “Look at Lit, she’s not complaining—”

“Yes I am.” I nodded emphatically, walked over to inspect the bits of terra-cotta. “They give me the creeps. I hate those things.”

“Really?” Natty looked genuinely surprised. She wiped her palms on the front of her baggy jeans, set her hammer on the wall, and started for the house. “Why ever would you hate them?”

We followed her into the kitchen. Natty heated some cider and we drank it, warming ourselves as she washed up at the sink. “You shouldn’t be afraid of the masks, Charlotte. You of all people.”

“Why? Because my father is scary Uncle Cosmo?”

“Noooo…” Natty dried her hands, looking very English with her sturdy pink face and pink Shetland sweater, her pants smudged with dirt. “Because you’re an actor, darling!” she said in her plummy voice. “Because you were born to it—”

“ I wasn’t born to it,” I snapped. Only a week before I’d made a fool of myself in Arsenic and Old Lace. “I hate it, and I hate those things—”

“Oh, don’t say that, Lit.” Natty’s gaze widened. “It’s what we all live for—”

“It’s a job, Mom. It’s just a stupid job.” Hillary hunched over his cider and stared at her balefully. “I mean, you’re not doing Shakespeare—”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said Natty. “Besides which, Lit’s parents, and your father and I, have done Shakespeare—”

“Oh, come on! Unk is starring in an Addams Family ripoff and you guys are—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Natty’s cheeks glowed bright red. “‘No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en, In brief, sir, study what you most affect.’”

Hillary sneered, “I’m not going to waste my life on goddam sitcoms—”

“Don’t you swear at me!”

“—and all this superstitious bullshit.”

Natty stood with her back to the counter, head thrown back. She looked as though she was about to burst into tears. I put my hand placatingly on Hillary’s and said, “Those masks just seem so tacky, that’s all, Mrs. Weller.”

“Tacky!” She sounded like Lady Bracknell contemplating a handbag. “Tacky? You children grew up on them.”

“Give me a break, Mom!” Hillary said, exasperated; but his fury was gone. “We grew up on takeout from Red Lotus—”

But Natty was already striding out of the kitchen. I slid off my chair and trailed behind her, and after a moment Hillary followed. We found her in a small, narrow, very cold room that had been the old farmhouse’s pantry, but which now housed Natty and Edmund’s books and theatrical memorabilia—tattered broadsheets, yellowed newspaper clippings in dusty frames, dogeaten scripts.

And plays, of course: the entire Oxford Shakespeare and all of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, as well as numerous lesser lights that had quickly burned out— A Sun for the Sunless, From Arcadia to New Rochelle, Madame Levinskey’s Hat. Except for the absence of certain titles, and the obviously British slant, the collection could have belonged to my own parents.