Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary Read online

  Juniper, Gentian, & Rosemary

  Pamela Dean

  Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary is a work of fiction. All the characters, locations, products, and events are products of the author's imagination, or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to real people, places, things, or events are strictly coincidental.

  Sonnet XII of Epitaph for the Race of Man by Edna St. Vincent Millay. From Collected Poems, HarperCollins. Copyright © 1934, 1962 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Holly Peppe, literary executor.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless, copyright © 1993. Published by Bantam Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the songs “Beautiful Red Dress,” “Ramon,” “The Day the Devil,” and “The Dream Before,” all from the album Strange Angels by Laurie Anderson, copyright © 1989 by Difficult Music.

  The translation of Sappho's fragment 94, translated by Ewen Bowie, is from The Oxford History of the Classical World edited by John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray, copyright © 1986, and is used by permission of Oxford University Press.

  Copyright © 1998 by Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover design by David Dyer-Bennet.

  Published by Blaisdell Press www.dd-b.net/blaisdellpress.

  Smashwords ebook edition first published 1-Mar-2016.

  This is the Smashwords ebook edition V1.0, 21-Feb-2016.

  To David, To Elise, and to Raphael

  Acknowledgments

  The author is much obliged to Laurie Campbell, David Dyer-Bennet, Lydia Nickerson, and Beth Friedman, for commentary;

  to Jan Murphy and Richard Knowles, for the loan of their telescope books;

  to Karen Uhrig, for advice on astronomical detail and psychology;

  to Hilary Hertzoff, for recommended reading;

  to Patricia Wrede, Elise Matthesen, and Caroline Stevermer, for support and patience;

  and to Emma Bull, Steven Brust, Raphael Carter, Kara Dalkey, and Will Shetterly, for detailed and honest opinions.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  JUNIPER, GENTIAN,

  & ROSEMARY

  Chapter 1

  There was a new house next door to Gentian’s. The lot it occupied had been vacant since before she was born. Little boys had played baseball there; Gentian and her older sister Juniper organized two girls’ softball teams one year and played furiously for one entire summer; the next year Gentian’s younger sister Rosemary built a dolls’ castle out of cardboard boxes and defended it against all comers with rocks and mud-balls. When Gentian became an astronomer, she had taken an old chaise lounge and her beginner’s binoculars into the middle of the lot and found the Summer Triangle.

  But for the past few years she and her sisters and the Zimmermans, the retired couple on the other side of the vacant lot, had planted gardens there. There had been some conflict about this, since the now-larger boys wanted to play soccer on the lot; but the Zimmermans, everybody said, had a way with teenagers, and they must have exercised it in this instance.

  The Zimmermans put in an enormous garden, with squash and corn and watermelon and even potatoes. Gentian and Juniper and Rosemary had each a small plot. Junie’s was the smallest because she hated sweaty work. She grew pink and white flowers: tulips, carnations, cosmos, bee balm. Rosemary grew only plants that came from very large seeds: nasturtiums, four-o’clocks, morning-glories. Gentian grew so many tomatoes and so much basil that her father threatened to make her learn Italian. She also grew the blue flowers she was named after, mostly because it made Junie and Rosie jealous. Junie hated juniper bushes and rosemary wasn’t hardy in Minnesota.

  But in September of the year Gentian entered the eighth grade, before the Zimmermans had even dug their potatoes, whoever owned the land must have sold it, for a building firm that seemed to consist of two sullen sunburned teenage boys and a large middle-aged man in dirty white overalls dug a basement and built a house in almost no time.

  On September 7, the first day of school, when Gentian dashed past the lot in a driving rain, the Zimmermans' garden was still blazing green and red and yellow. A week later the grass and wildflowers and gardens had vanished into a wilderness of mud and there was a huge pit in the middle of the lot. The week after that, when Gentian came home on Friday afternoon, the wooden frame of the house was up. She did not register this very precisely, because she was planning how to get up at five-thirty the next morning to watch Venus almost occlude Regulus. But when she took out the garbage on Saturday morning, still yawning, the frame had black tarry paper and a roof on it, and she remembered then that she had seen the frame the day before.

  On Sunday morning, it had red vinyl siding and the mud was all smoothed and graded. On Monday morning, when she went to school, arborvitae shrubs had been planted to hide the cement-block foundations. By the following Friday morning, there was a bright green lawn. Her father had planted grass seed in the bare spots of their own lawn a week before, but none of that had come up yet.

  At dinner that night she interrupted her parents' discussion of Junie’s demand to quit band instantly and take driver’s education instead.

  “Didn’t that house go up awfully fast?” she said.

  “What house, darling?” said her mother.

  “The one next door.”

  “Oh, they’ve been working on that half the summer.”

  “They started it the same day we started school,” said Gentian, incensed.

  “They were very quiet about it, though,” said her mother, passing Rosemary the gravy. “I remember thinking that.”

  “It doesn’t fit the neighborhood,” said Gentian’s father, giving her a look she knew the meaning of very well, though she didn’t know what was behind it.

  She kept her mouth shut, which was what the look meant, and thought about what her father had said. It was true. The neighborhood was composed of one or two large late-Victorian houses on every block, with the rest being stucco houses of varying size, most of them two-story, built in the 1920s and ’30s. The new one next door was a ranch house with mean little windows and a front porch that was just a slab of concrete with a couple of pillars holding up the roof. It was the only red house for blocks around, too; there wasn’t another one between here and the river.

  “I like it,” said Juniper, typically: she would often remark on a subject just as everybody assumed it had been dropped. In this case, Gentian could see, she had forestalled both her mother and Rosemary, each of whom had been about to say something.

  “It’s modern,” added Juniper.

  Their own house was one of the three-story Victorians; it had been built in 1901 and still had all its gas lighting fixtures, not to mention the telescope dome. Gentian loved it. Hearing Junie scorn it made her furious. But Junie got away with saying many awful things because s
he had red hair and people liked to joke about her temper.

  “It’s not, really,” said their mother, reflectively. “It looks like all those little boxes in Richfield. Fifties or sixties stuff. Maybe some from the forties.”

  “Beats this dump,” said Juniper, slicing viciously into a leaf of lettuce.

  “If we lived in it,” said Rosemary, “you’d have to share a room with Genny. It’s about the same size as our garage.” She favored Juniper with a brilliant smile. She was tiny and blonde and very fetching, and got away with saying a different sort of awful thing.

  Not that Junie would ever let anybody, however fetching, get away with anything. Junie was not susceptible to being fetched. “No, you'd have to share with Genny,” she said. “I’m the oldest, I’d get my own room.”

  “I’d rather share with Rosie any day,” said Gentian. “She doesn’t use hair spray.”

  “I’m pleased to hear,” said their mother, very dryly, “that should we suffer a financial catastrophe and be forced into smaller living quarters, you’d be willing to settle things so amicably.”

  Their father began to laugh. Their mother called him a saturnine redhead, and in fact he didn’t look as if he could laugh, so when he did one always felt either complimented or alarmed. In this case, Gentian understood that he was laughing because he was so fond of their mother, but both Juniper and Rosemary were affronted and excused themselves.

  “Pumpkin pie for dessert!” yelled their mother after them.

  “No, thank you!” Rosemary yelled back; the only response from Juniper was the resounding bang of her bedroom door.

  “I know what’s the matter with her,” said her mother. “She’s sixteen. But what’s the matter with Rosie?”

  “She’s eleven,” said Gentian.

  She herself was the middle sister in all possible ways, including having gotten the freckles that ought to have belonged to Juniper and the miserable sensitive skin that was Rosemary’s proper birthright. She had brown hair and boring, symmetrical features. She made up for these deficiencies as best she could by being clever. She knew that she wasn’t as quick on the uptake as Rosemary or as good at mathematics as Juniper, but she read a great deal more than they ever bothered with, and could come out with peculiar facts or common-sense observations, as the situation warranted. Most people thought this was funny, but her father always thanked her gravely, and her mother often talked to her as if she were another adult, as long as cleaning the cat box was not the subject of their conversation.

  Gentian added thoughtfully, “And she hates pumpkin.”

  “Eleven’s usually a good age,” said her mother. “Usually a lot better than fourteen.”

  “When I was eleven,” said Gentian, “I wanted to be a fisherman like in Captains Courageous.”

  “And what do you want to be now?” said her father.

  Gentian was an astronomer, but she wasn’t sure the universe knew this yet. She wasn’t sure she wanted it to. “A linguist,” she said, not quite at random; there had been an article about linguists in an old New Yorker that her father had left in the basement bathroom.

  Her parents looked at her as if she were an exhibit in a museum. She looked back at them, thinking of the bust of the Duc de Guise in the Art Institute. But her nose wasn’t sharp enough. “Chomskian or what?” said her mother after a minute.

  “What,” said Gentian.

  As she had hoped, this made them laugh, and her father got up and started to clear the table.

  On the fourth of October, a family moved into the new house. Juniper and Gentian and Rosemary all crowded into the landing of the front stairway, whose window conveniently overlooked the driveway up which the unfortunate moving crew was carrying a lot of heavy-looking furniture. There were huge carved chairs in dark wood, with tapestry seats; there were carved chests sprouting mirrors; there were bookcases with glass doors, and large mirrors with melted-looking gold frames, and no fewer than three grandfather clocks, and a huge number of boxes all of which made the people carrying them grunt and sweat and from time to time swear loudly.

  Gentian heard two phrases she had never encountered before, not even among the senior boys who smoked during lunch hour. She made a quiet bet with herself concerning when Juniper would choose to bring them out. Then one of the two young men carrying a gigantic headboard with what looked like roosters’ heads for posts tripped on the edge of the driveway. They staggered, swore, recovered, and bore the object in through the sliding glass door at the back of the house. But they had made Gentian really look at them. They were the same sullen sunburned teenagers who had helped build the house. She looked back at the truck, and out of it, lugging a peacock-blue wing chair, came the older man, still in his dirty white overalls.

  “It’s grandparents,” said Rosemary, in disgust. “That’s all old grownup stuff.”

  “Maybe they’re just rich,” said Juniper.

  “They wouldn’t be moving in next door to us if they were,” said their mother from their own huge carved table, where she was paying the bills, an operation that always made her speak as if the entire family were shortly to end up on the street.

  "If they are grandparents,” said Gentian, “they might plant a lot of rosebushes and give us cookies.”

  “I give you cookies,” said Juniper, affronted.

  “You burn them.”

  “I cook them. You should just eat the dough, you—”

  “Mom,” said Rosemary, “would our grandparents have done that if we had any?”

  “Given you cookies, probably,” said their mother. “But no rosebushes. Your grandmother could kill a plant faster than anybody I ever knew.”

  “What about Daddy’s mother?”

  “She had mathematical hedges and made cakes like geometrical diagrams,” said their father, coming in from the kitchen with a cup of coffee.

  He had filled it too full. Gentian bet with herself that he would spill three sploshes on the polished floor and one on the newly shampooed rug. He spilled two on the floor and missed the carpet by moving so fast he slopped coffee on the table instead. Gentian owed herself either a large box of chocolate (not to be shared with her sisters) or a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology, depending on how her allowance was holding out, whether the Martins needed a babysitter this weekend, and whether Jamie Barrows smiled at her in English class again.

  “Well, where are they?” said Rosemary, standing on Gentian’s foot in an effort to see further.

  “In the house directing the movers, stupid,” said Juniper.

  “I didn’t see them go in,” said Gentian, “and there’s no car, just the van.”

  “You don’t see everything, Genny,” said Juniper, “even if you are as nosy as—”

  “There isn’t a car,” said Gentian.

  “Maybe they came in the van,” said Rosemary, thoughtlessly. Gentian could see the precise moment in which she realized that she had been as stupid as Juniper said, and watched her forestall Juniper’s scathing comment with a shrill giggle. “Maybe they're vampires and they came in their coffins!” said Rosemary.

  “In those wooden chests,” said Gentian, collaborating happily.

  “Vampire grandparents,” said Juniper, relenting. “Watch your kittens when their grandchildren come to visit.”

  They pressed their foreheads to the glass and watched for coffins. A hat rack, rolls and rolls of carpet, the drawers for all the objects that had gone in earlier, the footboard of the rooster bed. A fine, misty drizzle began. A swirl of wind drove a shower of red leaves from their maple tree, and when it had subsided they saw a boy climb out of the truck.

  “There, Junie!” said Rosemary. “A vampire grandchild. It’s a boy, " she added.

  “Is he cute?” said their mother.

  “His hair is black, his eyes are blue, his lips as red as wine,” said their father, reflectively. “Or do his teeth brightly shine?”

  “He’s got black hair,” said Juniper. “Oh, God, Mom, he’s as tall as me
.”

  “He’s too old for you, then,” said her mother.

  “Why should his teeth shine?” said Gentian, turning around and addressing her father. If the boy was too old for Juniper, she might as well forget about him; and anyway he was probably like all the seniors.

  “If he’s a vampire,” said her father.

  Gentian rolled her eyes.

  Chapter 2

  Once the moving van had departed, the new house might as well still have been empty. No lights shone from its windows at night. No flattened cardboard boxes, evidence of unpacking, were put out for the recyclers on the Thursday following the arrival of the moving van. The red and yellow leaves from other people’s trees lay unraked on the lush green lawn. The black-haired boy did not go to Juniper and Gentian and Rosemary’s school, nor did he appear at the bus stop with the group of kids who attended the larger downtown school, or across the street where local children caught the other bus to suburban magnet schools.

  For three solid days after the new family moved in, Juniper pestered both of her parents to go over and welcome them. But their father was not sociable and their mother said she wasn’t going to bother people who were busy settling in just because her daughters had an obsession about vampires.

  Gentian was grumpy on October 7 because Venus was going to appear only six degrees away from Jupiter, and this allegedly spectacular pairing would be very hard for anybody in the Northern Hemisphere to see because of the planets’ position relative to the sun. The sun caused a lot of trouble, one way or another. Entertained by Junie’s defeat, but curious herself about the new family and feeling that everybody else might as well suffer annoyance if she had to, Gentian walked into the dining room where the rest of them were still eating their supper and read aloud from the opening of Pride and Prejudice.

  “‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. ’”