Agnes, lost, ventured. “Like … when someone takes a picture of a primitive person? They’re stealing the soul?”
“Like that, perhaps,” said Sophy, shaking her head in confusion. “If you cannot feel it as I do, then pretend for my sake that it’s real. Pretend it’s possible. I don’t want them using me that way.”
Carolyn nodded. “Then you want to be invisible.”
“Exactly,” Sophy whispered. “Oh, if I could be invisible.”
Carolyn rose to her feet, hands on her hips, jaw jutted. “Then we’ll help you become so.”
It took the others a few moments to catch up with her.
“She doesn’t have to be beautiful,” Carolyn said scornfully in the face of their doubt. “No law says she has to be beautiful.”
And she gathered the five of them up into her hands like a deck of cards and dealt them out again: You go here, you go there, fetch this, fetch that, supervising Sophy’s makeover without a moment’s hesitation. Clothing first, baggy skirts and too-large tops, shapeless and of indeterminate colors, borrowed from Carolyn herself; a little liquid makeup on the lips and brows, fading them into the face; a little more on the lashes, making her eyes look bald. Faye saw to that. Hair pulled straight back into a knot. Bettiann’s contribution. A touch of olive base, Jessamine’s, to take the bloom from those cheeks. Ophy provided the glasses, frames only at first.
It was Agnes who suggested the book. “You need a heavy book,” she said. “You can carry it up against your chest and walk sort of bent over. You’ll look like a brain, armed with the shield and buckler of the female intelligentsia.”
“I’ve got a thick book,” said Jessamine. “I found it in the bottom of the cupboard in my room, with about fifty years’ worth of dust on it. I’ll get it.”
She returned moments later bearing Edward Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume one. An old leather-bound library book, checked out years before by a feckless student, never returned. Sophy rose, took it into her arms, stooped slightly over it, and shuffled across the room. They all burst into laughter, even Sophy, though hers was a sound of honest joy floating on the sea of derision. What the rest of them took as a joke Sophy accepted as a reprieve.
In time her new self became familiar to them. With them, after a shower, her robe belted loosely around her, she was lovely as the dawn, but in public Sophy wore borrowed clothing, was camouflaged like a hermit crab, no longer the object of male fascination and desire.
It was a shared secret, one that made them more than merely friends. They became a club: the Decline and Fall Club. They swore an oath to one another. Even after they left school, they would stay close to one another. They would meet every year, and each of them would find a place to stand where she could be woman as woman was meant to be, and thereafter she would never decline or fall from that place.
Bantam Spectra Books by Sheri S. Tepper
Ask your bookseller for the ones you have missed.
RAISING THE STONES
BEAUTY
THE GATE TO WOMEN’S COUNTRY
GRASS
SIDESHOW
A PLAGUE OF ANGELS
SHADOW’S END
GIBBON’S DECLINE AND FALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sheri S. Tepper was born in 1929 in Denver, Colorado, and has lived in Colorado all her life. She worked in the administration of a multi-state non-profit organization until her retirement in 1986. Currently, she divides her time between writing and—in association with the American Minor Breeds Conservancy—raising various minor and rare breeds of domestic livestock and poultry on a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies. She is married, has two adult children and one grandchild.
In the few short years Ms. Tepper has been publishing, she has written over a dozen novels which have garnered the respect and admiration of both readers and critics. In addition to After Long Silence, her works include The Gate to Women’s Country, Grass, The Awakeners (published in two volumes as Northshore and Southshore), Beauty, (winner of the Locus award for best fantasy novel), Sideshow, A Plague of Angels, and Shadow’s End. Her most recent novel is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
