29
AT THE TOP of the ladder, at the windowsill, I hesitated, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Their room was darker than the night outside, and there seemed to be a mist within it thicker than the fog.
“Come here, Peter,” said Martha, whispering.
I dropped into the room.
“The ladder,” said Margot.
I pulled the ladder up, set it quietly in a heap on the floor, and closed the window.
“I’m not sure where you are,” I whispered back.
Was there giggling? Or only a snort from Margot? I’m not sure.
“Over here,” said Martha.
“Are you in your bed?” I asked.
“Yes, Peter,” said Margot. “We’re in our bed.”
I started toward their voices.
I remembered the girls’ bedroom well, since I had played there often when we were younger. It had always seemed cold to me—well, cool in the summer, cold the rest of the year. That’s a disadvantage of living in a stone building, but there are offsetting advantages. One is silence. It’s the reason stone is the preferred building material for dungeons, but the silence of stone also meant that the girls and I could scream and laugh and howl over our games and never provoke the parental visits that such shenanigans would have provoked in my house, built as it was of flimsier wood. I remembered, too, that their room was always a mess, the floor littered with toys, the bed rumpled, clothes in heaps, sometimes an open box of cookies or empty glasses and plates, left from their bedtime snacks. I wished that my mother would let me live that way.
What I found wasn’t what I remembered. I don’t have to worry about the possibility of filling in with later memories now: I remember this part of it perfectly well. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, Margot and Martha seemed to materialize, to accumulate out of the perfumed air of their bedroom. I began to walk, gingerly, on tiptoes, toward their bed.
“Why are you walking so funny?” asked Margot.
“I don’t want to trip on the toys,” I said. They snickered and snorted, and I immediately understood how ridiculous I’d been to think that there would be toys scattered on the floor. They were beyond toys. I—well, I’ve never gone beyond toys.
“Oh, Peter,” said Martha.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
Their bed was as I remembered it, a huge thing, made of heavy wood so dark that it seemed at its edges to disappear into the shadows, the headboard melding with the stone, the feet rooted to the floor. What light there was for me to navigate by came from the moon: pale light, shifting with the clouds, undependable and tricky. This was the way it would always be, whenever I climbed their ladder—or, rather, this is the way I remember it—their room always dimly lit, always with the silver light o’ th’ inconstant moon, never the yellow sun, so there came to be four Glynns for me, the golden Glynns of the daytime, the silver Glynns of the night.
“Climb up,” said Margot.
“Get in,” said Martha.
I started to climb up into the bed, but Margot said, “Wait,” and Martha said, “Get undressed.”
On any other occasion, in any other circumstances, in any location other than that room lit by the moon, silenced by stone, perfumed by Glynns, I would have experienced a moment of embarrassed hesitation, but I was soused—drunk on everything that had happened that night—and it seemed to me that we were out of time, outside Babbington, apparently outside my real life, in a game, in a movie, in a fairy tale, or in a Persian poem, so I simply said, “Oh, sure,” took my clothes off, and climbed into their bed.
The bed was high off the floor, and its mattress and covers were so plump and soft that climbing into that bed was like boarding one of the conveyances of fairy tales: an undulating carpet, a nutshell boat, a wandering cloud. For a moment there was a bit of clumsy, comical business, the three of us wriggling around—legs, arms, elbows, knees, giggles, and whispers—until I ended up between them. Then we lay there, still, on our backs, me in the middle, one on my left, the other on my right. A moment passed.
“We’re backwards,” said Margot, who was on my left.
Another scramble, and then they were reversed.
Each of them took one of my hands, drew it to her, and passed it over her. How vividly I feel my fingers’ blind journey over those pubescent landscapes: over the prominence of their little hipbones, down a declivity immediately beyond, up a gentle rise, on up a rounded hillock and into a wispy thicket, then a sudden slide into a slippery crevice, where I came upon something that felt oddly familiar, a rounded nubbin—
“There you are,” said Margot, arresting my hand, pressing my finger against its discovery.
Martha gave a little shudder and said, “Now, Peter, remember those peas?”
[to be continued]
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