Cobwebs Page 8

  Nancy might as well have slapped him, he looked so hurt. She could see that whatever was wrong with Granny, he felt responsible. Maybe a doctor always did, when someone hurt.

  “She’s a daughter,” he said. “It’s that blood connection.”

  “What about a granddaughter?”

  “That’s good, too,” he said, and smiled.

  “It might be.” Nancy pushed the words out, though her throat felt glued together. Grandpa looked away from her, ran a stubby finger over the weaving on the loom.

  “Grandpa, what—” Careful, now. “What’s the matter with Granny?”

  “You know, Nancy,” he said wearily. “Arthritis. And that stroke last summer didn’t do any good.” It had been the beginning of Rachel’s fight against the house calls.

  “Why do the house visits take so much out of her?” Careful.

  He studied the pattern in the weaving. “Moving around. Seeing new patients.”

  “What does that take out of her?” Something I have? Something I could give her? Say yes!

  He leaned against the doorjamb, eyes closed, sunning, silent. Was this saying no? “Energy,” he said. His eyes were still shut.

  Nancy turned. Energy I’ve got. I do! If it’s just a matter of that—But she knew there was something missing. She sat down on Mama’s loom bench and studied the pattern to figure out what came next. She took off her shoes and pressed her feet down on the treadles to make the right frames rise for the next thread. She picked up the submarine-shaped shuttle full of weft yarn and shot it through the shed.

  Wump. It did not sail through smoothly, as it did when Mama wove, but hung up in a stray thread from a treadle not pushed down firmly enough. Rats. Nancy pulled the shuttle out and disentangled the thread.

  “Learning to fix your mistakes?” Grandpa asked, peeking through one eye.

  “Maybe,” Nancy said. It took effort not to throw the shuttle across the room, let it take the whole pattern with it. She laid the shuttle back on the beater bar. “Grandpa. What do you love enough to fight for?”

  “This family,” he said abruptly. “What about you?”

  “Granny,” Nancy said.

  He opened his arms to her.

  Rachel came down looking twice as worried as she had when she went up. Nancy was alone, on her back under the loom, thinking crabby, questioning thoughts, her feet resting backward on the treadles.

  “Nancy Ariadne,” her mother said. “Green toenail polish?”

  “It matches my eyes,” Nancy said. She fluttered her fingers at Mama; the polish on them shone silver. “What’s up with Granny?”

  “She’s tired,” Rachel said. “It matches my eyes, too. You’d better get me some.”

  “Tired from what?”

  “Tired from life! Would you mind moving your feet?”

  “Not tired to death?”

  “Nancy,” Rachel said in a warning voice.

  Nancy lay there trying to whistle like Annette’s mother.

  “Could you stop that?” Rachel was barely patient.

  “I want to shave my legs,” said Nancy.

  “Why?”

  “The other girls at my school—”

  “Followers,” Rachel said. “Be a leader, Nancy.”

  “Right,” Nancy said. “I’ll lead a new fad of hairy legs.”

  Her Greene Mamba had the good grace to smile. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “Just keep the hair on your legs.”

  “Can’t you explain? It’s not politics, is it? It’s spiderness.”

  “Yes.”

  “Something else that’s either going to show up or not?”

  Her mother was silent for a long moment. “If you’re eighteen and you don’t need it, you can shave it off.”

  “Because I won’t be a minor anymore?”

  “No. Because it’ll be too late by then.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Ack! It’s better if you find out yourself.”

  “Find out what? Nobody’s telling me anything.” She pulled herself up from the floor. “Look, Mama, I’m no roof dweller, but I can climb. I’ve been learning. I’m getting better. And I’m not even as scared.” So she was lying. Wasn’t courage more courageous when you were scared? “I’m no ground dweller, but I’m getting better at knitting. My new sweater is beautiful.” She was shivering, wanting so badly to be clear, to be understood. “Here’s what I want to know: One, what good is my leg hair? Two, what does Grandpa Joke need so much money for? And three, why does Granny look near death just because she went along with him on a doctor’s house call?”

  Rachel steadied herself, both hands on the strong wood of the beater. “Nancela,” she said. “You went up to the door last night, and you weren’t supposed to. What happened?”

  Nancy swallowed. “There was a man—the man on the phone, I think. And a girl with wings.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard right.” She held her mother’s eyes with her own. “What else do you want to know?” Would Mama bargain? “Mama?”

  “Don’t shave,” Rachel said. “That’s all the information I’m giving you. It’s better that way, and you’ve got to trust me.”

  “Because what I don’t know can’t hurt me?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m going to Dad’s tonight.”

  “Good,” Rachel said. “He said that he wanted you tonight. But he’s not going to tell you, either.”

  For a moment Nancy stayed there, studying her mother’s green eyes. “Give, Mama,” she said.

  Rachel seemed to grow even more still and quiet than usual. “It’s either there or it isn’t, my darling. I can’t just ‘give’ it, and you can’t just take it.”

  “Give what? Take what?”

  Nancy felt abandoned. She bolted upstairs, stood breathing on the landing until she was calm enough to enter Granny’s kitchen. At the window upstairs she filled the birdfeeder and watched Rachel sitting at her loom, rubbing her forehead. Granny, in her wheelchair at the table, struggled to paint a pot, which was an interesting course of action, considering the sort of day she’d been having, or a testimony to Rachel’s daughterly powers. She watched Nancy watching. “The trouble with you is, you don’t know your own strengths.”

  Nancy turned from the window. “What strengths?” She felt that everyone was disappointed in her. And they wouldn’t even tell her what was missing, so it wouldn’t hurt her! Well, it was hurting her.

  “Strengths. But you’d better start finding out. Time is getting short.” Nancy banged the window shut, making the birds fly away.

  “Everyone around here talks in riddles,” she said.

  “That’s your problem,” said Granny.

  16

  Nancy woke in her hammock at Ned’s, and saw, on the window before her nose, a spider. She closed her eyes to shut it out, and opened them a few minutes later. It was gone.

  What had awakened her was a door closing. Was Dad here? There was a note tucked into the webbing of the hammock beside her head: GONE TO MAMA’S.

  Mama’s? Without her? Had she seemed so sound asleep that he hadn’t wanted to wake her? In that instant she spotted her father, crossing the rooftops. He was already a few buildings away and heading off at a steady trot, running the roofs as if they were an obstacle course, dodging chimneys and water tanks, antennas, and skylights.

  She thought back on all the times Ned had come home over the rooftops. It had never occurred to her to go with him before. When he was with her, he traveled on the ground. Now she leaped out of the hammock, hitting the floor with a bang. She felt freaky, as Annette would say. Breathe deep, Nancy, she told herself. Go after him! Nancy knotted the laces of her shoes together and slung them around her neck as she crossed Ned’s rooftop.

  And then she was doing it. There was only one way to get from Ned’s roof to the next: Jump. There was no gap to fall into, just the different roof levels to account for, and the walls to cross. Jump. So what if she
’d never done such a thing before. So what if going down the walls scared the snot out of her. If only she had silk.

  She didn’t. She tried to put thoughts out of her head and just blast along.

  I can do this. (Maybe.)

  Climb the wall. (Just like the other time.)

  Don’t think twice. (Yeah, right.)

  Leap for it. (Only as far as absolutely necessary.)

  Land on all fours on the next roof. (Ow. No, actually it didn’t hurt. Why doesn’t it hurt?)

  Jump up and run.

  She kept Ned in sight, his tails of hair bobbing and springing. It wasn’t that light out yet, but a gold edge to the sky showed her the way. How had it gotten to be morning so fast? She hated to lose him, but couldn’t thud too heavily with her feet, tried to sound like nothing more than a squirrel or a pigeon on the roof. This would have been harder with her Docs on. Her feet were already sore and scraped.

  Over the rim of a roof came the sun, shining on brave Nancy, leaping roof to roof. It’s easy, really, not the biggest jump I’ll ever have to make, just across, not down. If it’s so easy, why can’t I catch him?

  Yes, Ned was faster, so much faster, inhumanly fast and as practiced at it as Anansi the shape-shifting spider himself. Through a network of rooftops, he led her, and the gap continually grew between them until he was nothing but a black dot with legs, scampering in and out of view. She leaped up onto a wall to glimpse him again and reeled backward, sick and spinning. There was no other roof to leap to, only the street far below and, across it, a tall white church, then the high train trestle that took the trains across Fourth Avenue and the bridge over the Gowanus Canal.

  No time to sit gagging, her head whirling. Stand up and find him. But he was gone, her Arach-Ned. And she was there alone on the top of some strange yellow-colored building, with a lady coming out the door with her washing and looking aghast to see her there.

  The lady probably believed she was about to be attacked. Behind her, Nancy saw Ned reappear atop the train trestle, across the gap, a small dark model of himself. How? How how how how?

  “You get the hell off this roof!” the lady yelled.

  Nancy skimmed over the wall to the fire escape. Oh, horror!

  “Stupid kids! I’m going to call the cops if I catch you up here again!”

  Don’t think about it. Keep moving. She was going down down down now, and she couldn’t help the way her feet felt stuck in tar, not fast enough, like in a dream.

  Inch by inch, sweating, stuck, she forced herself. At last she dangled from her fingertips and dropped, landing hard, not light and airy like her dad. Nancy cleaned her palms on her hips and examined them closely. Nothing there but dirt. She still wasn’t a drop-and-dragger and perhaps never would be. If Ned had taken her with him, she would only have dragged him down.

  It was even slower going, down in the street. Nancy didn’t much like the area around the canal. It wasn’t so nice, although people said it was “up and coming.” It was grayer, with not as many trees as other parts of Brooklyn, and it smelled of garbage and dirty water. Nancy was scared. She tried not to run, tried not to call attention to herself, to blend in. So much for the garish, bright spider.

  Soon enough she climbed the hill up from the canal and was among houses again. She found herself walking under trees with the lower ten feet of their trunks covered in ivy; they made her think of poodles’ legs (really large poodles) or satyrs, those half men-half goats from the Greek myths she’d read in freshman English. She laced her fingers in the ivy as she passed, skimming the papery, cool leaves with her fingertips and thinking she’d like to crawl inside them.

  Nancy didn’t blame Ned for keeping to the roofs. He beat her easily to Rachel’s. What did he need to go so fast for anyway?

  She let herself quietly into the basement apartment. Mama was still sleeping and Dad wasn’t there. She had had a quiet hope that sleeping with Mama was his reason for leaving Nancy in the penthouse so early in the morning. She stepped back out again. She could smell Dad’s almondy smell in the old, gold-wallpapered hallway.

  She climbed the stairs to Granny and Grandpa’s apartment but stopped short of knocking. Nancy knew where to find her grandfather, this early on a Sunday morning. Some people were already in the community garden working, laying out sticks and strings for seed rows, weeding out what was already growing. Sure enough, Grandpa Joke was in his little plot, putting metal rings around the tomato plants to support them as they grew.

  “What’s going on, Grandpa?” she asked, hands on her hips.

  “Child! What are you doing here so early in the morning?” He looked at his wristwatch, hung over a fence post.

  Nancy snagged the watch on her finger. “You’re going to lose this,” she said. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Who? Here, Nancy, steady this plant for me.” His large hands moved the dirt around like shovels. The tomato leaves were soft fronds of the warmest green color. They practically had bubbles of life coming off them, they were so healthy. Nancy squatted down in the dirt and lifted the leaves of a tomato plant, felt the gentle bristles of its thick stem.

  “Another early riser!” Ned was at the fence, his dark eyes glinting at her in a mood she couldn’t identify, an old wooden ladder in one hand and a saw in the other. The ladder was one that had been stored in Rachel’s garden shed for years.

  “What are you doing with that?” Nancy asked. “What is this, gardening day? Is Mama out gardening, too?”

  Ned put up his hand like a shield, as though she were blowing wind on him.

  “Mama’s still asleep,” he said. “What are you doing here at the crack of dawn tying tomatoes?”

  “Getting a lesson, what else?” said Grandpa.

  “In what, gardening?”

  “Or how to get here safely at the crack of dawn?” Grandpa’s voice sounded accusing.

  “Looks like she got that figured out,” Ned said.

  “Not exactly,” Nancy said, glaring.

  “I’m going to saw this in half, Joke. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Ned asked. “Nancy, come lend a hand.” Nancy grabbed the ladder. Ned started to saw it in half. The ladder shook so that Nancy had to put all her weight on it to keep it from shuddering out from under Ned’s saw. He paused, bent close to her ear. “Don’t look now. There’s a boy on the corner acting like he’s got business being here staring at you. Here, don’t look! Hold the ladder!”

  Grandpa leaned over the fence. “We’re going to stand this up at each end of the garden, Nancy,” he said. “Then we’re going to string from one ladder to the next, make a support for our peas and beans.”

  Nancy kept her eyes on the ladder. The saw bit into the worn old wood, Ned’s dreadlocks hung down, sawdust drifted onto the sidewalk.

  “Can you think what it’s going to look like, Nancy?”

  “Nope.” What do I care, Dad?

  “Wait and see!” Why was he trying to distract her? Half the ladder dropped out of her hand and clattered to the sidewalk. She shot a look at the corner. Dion!

  Ned heard her intake of breath. “It’s not the first time, is it?” he asked, low.

  She shook her head, glanced at Grandpa Joke, who was merrily planting his half of the ladder in the dirt, oblivious. With a spool of brown string, he connected the halves of the ladder. The string slumped between them. He tied another string to the fence, to the ladder top, let it drop with the other string, then brought it up to the other ladder and across to the other fence.

  “Is it the bridge?” Nancy asked.

  “What bridge?” Ned demanded.

  “Our bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “The spiderweb bridge,” said Ned.

  “Listen to this!” Grandpa Joke put a finger in the air, made a little speech with the ball of string in his other hand, in a position like the Statue of Liberty. Nancy prayed Dion was too far away to hear. “A quote. From a scientist. ‘It is a rare person—’”

  “What is, a spider?” Ned as
ked.

  Nancy thought: I have no spiderness. I am not a rare person. She glanced toward the corner. In this golden light, Dion’s clothes looked gray, almost pale brown. He was wearing his old Mets cap, sloppy on his head, and paced on the corner as though he were waiting for a bus. He moved like a marionette, his joints too loose, bouncing up off the balls of his feet as if gravity affected him only minimally.

  “No. A person. Listen: ‘It is a rare person who does not feel at least a bit uncomfortable in the presence of a large, dark, hairy spider darting across the floor.’” Nancy bent over, giggling, a bundle of jangling nerves. She felt as though she were connected by invisible wires to each of the people around her—her dad, her grandfather, Mama and Granny in the house, and Dion on the corner—and as though each of those wires were vibrating with some different and separate anticipation or warning. A change was coming, advancing toward her.

  When Nancy looked up again at last, Dion wasn’t there.

  “No more fly on the wall,” Ned said.

  Grandpa Joke asked, “What fly?”

  Ned answered, “Never mind.”

  Grandpa said, “Ask your granny about flies on the wall.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ask.”

  “Dad,” Nancy said, “what would you do if you wanted to know all about someone?”

  The question flustered Ned. “Well, what would you do, Nancy?”

  “Follow him,” she said fiercely, yanking a knot.

  “Follow whom?” asked Grandpa Joke.

  “Me,” said Ned, his hand on Grandpa Joke’s shoulder. Nancy didn’t bother correcting him. Let them think what they want. Besides, it was true that morning.

  But this answer made Grandpa Joke afraid. “Oh, Nancy,” he said, leaning heavily on the bridge, which, surprisingly, took his weight. “Go slow.”

  2. The Knot

  Our souls sit close and silently within,

  And their own webs from their own entrails spin;

  And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such

  That, spider-like, we feel the tenderest touch.