a visitor. From Outside. Jennie saw him.”
I go on smiling. Rachel—nor Jennie, either—can’t remember when disease colonies had lots of visitors. First bulky figures in contamination suits, then a few years later, sleeker figures in the sani-suits that took their place. People were still being interred from Outside, and for years the checkpoints at the Rim had traffic flowing both ways. But of course Rachel doesn’t remember all that; she wasn’t born. Mamie was only twelve when we were interred here. To Rachel, a visitor might well be a great event. I put out one hand and stroke her hair.
“Jennie said he wants to talk to the oldest people in the colony, the ones who were brought here with the disease. Hal Stevenson told her.”
“Did he, sweetheart?” Her hair is soft and silky. Mamie’s hair had been the same at Rachel’s age.
“He might want to talk to you!”
“Well , here I am.”
“But aren’t you excited? What do you suppose he wants?”
I’m saved from answering her because Mamie comes in, her boyfriend Peter Malone following with a string- bag of groceries from the repository.
At the first sound of the doorknob turning, Rachel gets up from beside my chair and pokes at the fire. Her face goes completely blank, although I know that part is only temporary. Mamie cries, “Here we are!” in her high, doll-baby voice, cold air from the hall swirling around her like bright water. “Mama darling—how are you feeling? And Rachel! You’ll never guess—Pete had extra depository cards and he got us some chicken! I’m going to make a stew!”
“The back wall fell off the bedroom,” Rachel says flatly. She doesn’t look at Peter with his string-crossed chicken, but I do. He grins his patient, wolfish grin. I guess that he won the depository cards at poker. His fingernails are dirty. The part of the newspaper I can see says ESIDENT CONFISCATES C.
Mamie says, “What do you mean, ‘fell off?’”
Rachel shrugs. “Just fell off. Termites.”
Mamie looks helplessly at Peter, whose grin widens. I can see how it will be: They will have a scene later, not completely for our benefit, although it will take place in the kitchen for us to watch. Mamie will beg prettily for Peter to fix the wall. He will demur, grinning. She will offer various smirking hints about barter, each hint becoming more explicit. He will agree to fix the wall. Rachel and I, having no other warm room to go to, will watch the fire or the floor or our shoes until Mamie and Peter retire ostentatiously to her room. It’s the ostentation that embarrasses us. Mamie has always needed witnesses to her desirability.
But Peter is watching Rachel, not Mamie. “The chicken isn’t from Outside, Rachel. It’s from that chicken-yard in Block B. I heard you say how clean they are.”
“Yeah,” Rachel says shortly, gracelessly.
Mamie rolls her eyes. “Say ‘thank you,’ darling. Pete went to a lot of trouble to get this chicken.”
“Thanks.”
“Can’t you say it like you mean it?” Mamie’s voice goes shrill.
“Thanks,” Rachel says. She heads towards our three-walled bedroom. Peter, still watching her closely, shifts the chicken from one hand to the other. The pressure of the string bag cuts lines across the chicken’s yellowish skin.
“Rachel Anne Wilson—”
“Let her go,” Peter says softly.
“No,” Mamie says. Between the five crisscrossing lines of disease, her face sets in unlovely lines. “She can at least learn some manners. And I want her to hear our announcement! Rachel, you just come right back out here this minute!”
Rachel returns from the bedroom; I’ve never known her to disobey her mother. She pauses by the open bedroom door, waiting. Two empty candle scones, both blackened by old smoke, frame her head. It has been since at least last winter that we’ve had candles for them. Mamie, her forehead creased in irritation, smiles brightly.
“This is a special dinner, all of you. Pete and I have an announcement. We’re going to get married.”
“That’s right,” Peter says. “Congratulate us.”
Rachel, already motionless, somehow goes even stiller. Peter watches her carefully. Mamie casts down her eyes, blushing, and I feet a stab of impatient pity for my daughter, propping up mid-thirties girlishness on such a slender reed as Peter Malone. I stare at him hard. If he ever touches Rachel… but I don’t really think he would. Things like that don’t happen anymore. Not Inside.
“Congratulations,” Rachel mumbles. She crosses the room and embraces her mother, who hugs her back with theatrical fervor. In another minute, Mamie will start to cry. Over her shoulder I glimpse Rachel’s face, momentarily sorrowing and loving, and I drop my eyes.
“Well! This calls for a toast!” Mamie cries gaily. She winks, makes a clumsy pirouette, and pulls a bottle from the back shelf of the cupboard Rachel got at the last donations lottery. The cupboard looks strange in our kitchen: gleaming white lacquer, vaguely Oriental-looking, amid the wobbly chairs and scarred table with the broken drawer no one has ever gotten around to mending. Mamie flourishes the bottle, which I didn’t know was there. It’s champagne.
What had they been thinking, the Outsiders who donated champagne to a disease colony? Poor devils, even if they never have anything to celebrate… Or Here’s something they won’t know what to do with… Or Better them than me—as long as the sickies stay Inside… It doesn’t really matter.
“I just love champagne!” Mamie cries feverishly; I think she has drunk it once. “And oh look—here’s someone else to help us celebrate! Come in, Jennie—come in and have some champagne!”
Jennie comes in, smiling. I see the same eager excitement that animated Rachel before her mother’s announcement. It glows on Jennie’s face, which is beautiful. She has no disease on her hands or her face. She must have it somewhere, she was born Inside, but one doesn’t ask that. Probably Rachel knows. The two girls are inseparable. Jennie, the daughter of Mamie’s dead husband’s brother, is Rachel’s cousin, and technically Mamie is her guardian. But no one pays attention to such things anymore, and Jennie lives with some people in a barracks in the next Block, although Rachel and I asked her to live here. She shook her head, the beautiful hair so blonde it’s almost white bouncing on her shoulders, and blushed in embarrassment, painfully not looking at Mamie.
“I’m getting married, Jennie,” Mamie says, again casting down her eyes bashfully. I wonder what she did, and with whom, to get the champagne.
“Congratulations!” Jennie says warmly. “You, too, Peter.”
“Call me Pete,” he says, as he has said before. I catch his hungry look at Jennie. She doesn’t, but some sixth sense—even here, even Inside—makes her step slightly backwards. I know she will go on calling him ‘Peter.’
Mamie says to Jennie, “Have some more champagne. Stay for dinner.”
With her eyes Jennie measures the amount of champagne in the bottle, the size of the chicken bleeding slightly on the table. She measures unobtrusively, and then of course she lies. “I’m sorry, I can’t—we ate our meal at noon today. I just wanted to ask if I could bring someone over to see you later, Gram. A visitor.” Her voice drops to a hush, and the glow is back. “From Outside.”
I look at her sparkling blue eyes, at Rachel’s face, and I don’t have the heart to refuse. Even though I can guess, as the two girls can not, how the visit will be. I am not Jennie’s grandmother, but she has called me that since she was three. “All right.”
“Oh, thank you!” Jennie cries, and she and Rachel look at each other with delight. “I’m so glad you said yes, or else we might never get to talk to a visitor up close at all!”
“You’re welcome,” I say. They are so young. Mamie looks petulant; her announcement has been upstaged. Peter watches Jennie as she impulsively hugs Rachel. Suddenly I know that he too is wondering where Jennie’s body is diseased, and how much. He catches my eye and looked at the floor, his dark eyes lidded, half ashamed. But only half. A log cackles in the wooden stove, and for a brief moment the fire flares.
The next afternoon Jennie brings the visitor. He surprises me immediately: he isn’t wearing a sani-suit, and he isn’t a sociologist.
In the years following the internments, the disease colonies had a lot of visitors. Doctors still hopeful of a cure for the thick gray ridges of skin that spread slowly over a human body—or didn’t, nobody knew why. Disfiguring. Ugly. Maybe eventually fatal. And communicable. That was the biggie: communicable. So doctors in sani-suits came looking for causes or cures. Journalists in sani-suits came looking for stories with four-color photo
