13.

Between Two Skies

The Portal District, Requiem City — AGH 23

Effie Crandall counted the peas in Common, apologized for the ones on the floor in Reach, and had her hands under the table before Gran told her to put them there.

“You can pick them up first.”

She crawled after a pea that had reached the far leg. It had quite a good chance of getting away. From underneath, the kitchen was mostly shoes and the bottoms of things, with a little pale light where the door did not fit the sill. Her schoolbag lay across the opening. She had brought the wrong book home again.

Not wrong for today. Wrong for tomorrow.

She was eleven and had two of nearly everything, which Gran called extravagance and her father called arithmetic. There was this narrow blue house in the Portal District, and there were Aunt Bess's rooms over the print shop in Talon's Reach, where they stayed on tide-nights when the Verge ran late and the queue for the last crossing was too much trouble. There was the Requiem school in the mornings and the Reach school three afternoons a week. A book could be entirely right on one side of a night's sleep and entirely wrong on the other.

She caught the pea against a shoe and came up with it.

“That one can go in the scraps,” Gran said.

“I know.”

Effie made the little palm-drop that meant truly. Gran looked at her hand.

“And you needn't conduct it there.”

Effie tipped the pea into the scrap bowl. She had been trying to tell Gran about Denny, and she had only reached the good part when the peas had gone.

Denny was an otter, her best friend at the Reach school, and the family kept the fish counter by the Reach-side stairs. Effie had learned to use her fingers for the parts of a sentence Denny could say with an ear. Human ears were very little help. That afternoon two customers had reached for the same parcel. Denny had answered one in Common while an ear and a quick turn of the head told the other which bundle to take; Effie, standing at the end of the counter, had already lifted it. They had finished so nearly together that the second customer thanked Denny for the fish Effie was holding. Then the first customer thanked Effie for the fish Denny was holding, and Denny had tried to return both thanks in the wrong language on purpose.

“Only when Denny said—” Effie began.

“The pods go in the other bowl.”

“This one isn't empty yet.”

“Then finish it before you wave it about.”

Effie pushed the last pea out and took another pod. “Denny said this bit, but meant that one.” She set one hand to either side of the bowl.

“Which one?”

“The other customer. Because—” Her fingers supplied what the ear had done.

“Hands down, Effie. Tell me properly.”

She put them against her knees. “Denny said thank you to the person who'd thanked me, but that wasn't the person Denny was thanking.”

Gran waited.

“Because that person had the fish.”

“I thought they both had fish.”

They did. Effie could see the whole thing. She could see Denny looking one way and speaking another, the two parcels, her own hand halfway to the counter. Without moving it, she could not put the joke where it went.

“It was funny,” she said.

“I'm sure it was. But you mix things up until you can't tell them yourself. Neither fish nor fowl.”

Effie watched a split pod uncurl beside the bowl. There had been nothing mixed up at the counter. Even the wrong thanks had been wrong in exactly the right way.

She cracked another pod with her thumbs held low.

Aunt Bess arrived with a playbill wrapped round four tickets. There was ink along the side of one finger, and she left a mark on the bowl when she reached for a pea.

“Those aren't cooked,” Gran said.

“I noticed.” Bess ate it. “We got the bills.”

She opened the sheet on a dry part of the table. Effie leaned over it. BETWEEN TWO SKIES filled the top in letters that looked as if they ought to cost extra. Below were names, smaller names, more names, and two columns she did not immediately want to read.

“The opera?” Gran said.

“The opera. Four seats. Eighth performance.”

“Your shop printed all this?”

“And will be printing more, if people keep disagreeing about it.”

Effie had seen one of the disagreeing pamphlets. It had been left on a stair and had contained the word ruinous three times on one side. She had not read the other.

“Is there an interval?” she asked.

Bess looked at her over the playbill. “Yes.”

“With things?”

“I expect they'll provide a floor and some walls.”

“Aunt Bess.”

“There'll be sweets.”

Effie drew the bill closer, taking care with the pea stain. A Reach composer and a Requiem librettist. A lover from each world. Her father could have the fourth ticket. If the lovers were sad for a very long time, as people in operas were said to be, perhaps there would be two intervals.

She found the acts and began counting.

*   *   *

The third balcony had more stairs than Effie thought a third of anything should have. By the time they reached their row, Gran had decided to keep her coat on, Father had decided to take his off, and Aunt Bess was holding all four programs while they made those decisions again in a narrower space.

Effie sat between Bess and Gran, with Gran's coat pressed against her arm. A child at the far side of Bess had a paper bag which made a promising noise.

“Can you see?” Father asked from Gran's other side.

She could see the stage if she sat forward. She could see a very large hat if she sat back. The hat belonged to somebody in the row below who had already been asked to remove it.

“Yes.”

“You needn't lean right over,” Gran said.

Effie moved back enough to satisfy her and opened the program above the hat.

Sela was a wool merchant's daughter. Torvald-of-the-Reach had a long description with two names in it that Effie could not be bothered to keep apart. She found which performers played them and then discovered that the small words below the list were not part of the opera at all.

“That's our line,” Bess whispered, pointing to the printer's name.

“It's very small.”

“Try sounding a little more impressed.”

Effie looked at the row of heads below them, at the boxes farther down, at the folds of curtain reaching almost out of sight. “You must have done an awful lot.”

“We did.” Bess put her finger back inside the program. Effie could still see the ink on it.

Then the lights changed, somebody below finally took the hat off, and the orchestra began.

Torvald was sung by an enormous elk in half-armor. When he turned, the light moved over the metal on his chest; when he sang low, Effie felt it through the boards under her shoes. She liked him at once. Sela's voice could go so high that Effie found herself lifting her chin after it, as if she might see where it stopped.

But they took a terrible time to say anything to each other.

At the portal-fair Sela sang in Common. Torvald stood very still and waited. Then he answered in Reach, and she waited. Between one answer and the next the orchestra had something to say too. Effie understood them both. She knew the question before Torvald had begun his answer, and while he sang it she could think of three other things Sela might ask. Sela asked none of them. She waited for the orchestra.

There was a commoner who had won the Hammond Seat and now had to choose between love and a ledger. The man behind Effie said “Quite” in a heavy whisper. Gran nodded at something in the song. Effie looked down at the program to see how many scenes were left.

She and Denny could have settled all this while wrapping one fish.

The child beyond Bess shook the paper bag. Effie listened to it with longing. At last a row of dancers came on, which seemed promising, but they turned out to have an opinion about the ledger.

At the interval Father brought toffee. The pieces were stuck together, and Bess used the folded corner of her program to keep one while he pulled the bag away. Effie took the piece that remained attached to that piece. Gran said it was too large; Father said he was afraid it was now committed.

She ate it slowly, with considerable attention. By the time the second act was ready to begin, there was a hard little corner of sweetness behind her back teeth and no way of reaching it without Gran seeing.

The lovers were on opposite sides of the closed portal. Their families had put them there. Effie could have told the families this was a poor way of getting the opera finished.

She folded the sweet paper small and tucked it into her program.

*   *   *

Sela was standing alone in a pale patch of light. Torvald stood far away on the other side of the dark gate, his great head lowered. A few strings continued after the rest of the orchestra stopped.

Sela began in Common.

I am half a person in a whole city.

Her voice held the last part open. Effie waited for it to finish, and while she waited Torvald came in underneath it.

I am a whole person in half a world.

She looked quickly from one to the other. Sela had not stopped. Neither had the elk. For a moment she followed his words and lost hers; then she caught hers and he had gone somewhere else. The low music seemed to hold a place for the high, but every time she looked at one singer she missed the place where the other fitted.

She stopped looking between them.

Sela sang We are not— and held the phrase open. Torvald's low torn entered before her note fell away; in the space after it her voice gave between, his gave two skies. Effie had been waiting for two separate sentences. She was already following one.

Then the low voice began a span. The high voice reached out along it. One wing came in Common, in each in Reach, but the Reach phrase was still moving when Common supplied the middle, and Effie's hands lifted from the program.

She knew where the next words would go. Not what they would be. Where they would go.

The elk drew out a low note and Sela's answer passed through it. The turn of the phrase did what Denny's ear had done at the counter: kept one thought present while another joined it. There was no waiting to put the first away. Effie heard the sentence running through both mouths, and when it came round again she could follow it all the way.

We are not torn between two skies. We are the wingspan, one wing in each, and whole nowhere but the middle, and the middle is not nothing: the middle is where the flying is.

Her knees struck the back of the seat in front.

She was standing.

Bess turned toward her. Gran caught her sleeve. The program slid off Effie's lap, and she reached after it too late. She could hear the next line already coming; she could not bend down and lose it. Her hand came up again with the two bent knuckles that meant I'm still with you. Take your time. She made it toward the stage.

“Effie,” Gran whispered. “Sit down.”

The child beyond Bess was on their feet too. Across the gap at the end of the balcony, another child stood with both hands on the rail. Lower down, where Effie could see a slice of the side gallery, a little raccoon in a pressed collar was pulling at the sleeve of the person beside her. That person leaned close to hear; the raccoon pointed at the singers instead.

Effie made the sign again.

There was a sound coming from her which she hoped nobody else could hear. Her face was wet. The two voices had come apart for a moment, and she wanted them back together so badly that she leaned forward into Gran's hand.

“What is it?” Bess said.

Effie tried to answer. She could not give Bess the beginning without losing the end. She pointed too, then opened her hands because pointing was no good either. The high voice returned, the low voice met it, and there it was again, the thing she had been doing every day, suddenly large enough to hear from the third balcony.

Gran's hold eased. Her fingers stayed at Effie's sleeve.

Sela held the last note. Under it the low sound went on, then thinned, and Effie waited for the place where another word could enter.

Nothing did.

Somebody coughed. A hand clapped once and stopped. The man behind them whispered, “Beautifully done,” to somebody Effie could not see.

She was still standing, and now she was aware of it in a different way. Her knees hurt a little. The child beside Bess looked straight at her, mouth open, and she nodded so quickly that a tear fell onto her coat.

A door opened beside the orchestra. Effie could see it because someone below had turned to look. A small gray mockingbird came out and hopped up onto the conductor's rail.

“That's him,” Bess said.

The composer was much smaller than Effie had expected. The rail looked broad under his feet. He turned his head toward the balcony, and she found herself holding the two-knuckle sign still for him. Could he see it from there? She lifted her hand a little higher.

He opened his beak.

The high line began, and the low line began with it.

Effie gripped the top of the seat. The low line was back beneath her shoes. She could see the still stage behind him, Sela and Torvald looking toward the rail. Both sounds were coming from the small gray body. The words met sooner this time because she was ready for them.

She looked at Gran.

Gran had taken out a handkerchief during the duet. It lay folded over two fingers now. She was looking past Effie at the rail. Effie waited for her to look round, but Gran kept listening. Her mouth moved once, not enough for Effie to know which words she was trying.

The bird sang the sentence through. When the last sound had died, he stood for a moment with his beak closed, looking up.

“Bothwise,” he said.

His beak clicked in the little Reach shrug. Effie knew it before he went on.

“The children already knew. I just wanted their parents to hear it once.”

“Bothwise,” Effie said.

It fitted in her mouth easily. She had been afraid it would be longer.

The child beyond Bess repeated it. Effie leaned across her aunt to hear.

“You heard the middle?” the child asked.

She nodded. “When he came in—”

“Before she—”

“Yes.”

Bess looked from one to the other. Then she bent, retrieved Effie's program and shook the sweet paper out of it.

“You can both sit down now,” she said, and kept the paper in her own lap.

The applause had begun farther down. It reached them in uneven bursts, with somebody below still clapping while a neighbor stopped. Gran put the handkerchief into Effie's hand. Effie wiped her face and looked at her, but Gran was looking at the bird again.

Father leaned across Gran to ask what the word was. Effie told him. Then she turned the other way and said it to the child once more, just to hear the reply.

*   *   *

By autumn she had heard it at the fish counter, outside school and from a woman selling buttons who said she took money bothwise. Denny had made up a joke which depended on saying it with a mouth full of something. Gran would not have liked that joke even with all the gestures left in.

On a tide-morning in the wash yard, Effie was telling Gran about a piece they had read at school. It began in Common but did not stay there, and when Gran asked which teacher had given it to her, she said, “The Reach one. We read it bothwise.”

“There's that word again.”

Effie lifted a shirt out of the tub. It pulled heavily at her hands. She bunched it against herself to turn it, and cold water ran inside her sleeves.

“You heard it,” she said.

“I heard a good many things that night.”

“But you heard the bird do both.”

“Hold that over the tub.”

Effie brought it back. Gran took the other end, and between them they twisted the shirt until the running water became a patter.

“Bothwise,” Gran said. “Hmph. In my day we said neither fish nor fowl.”

Effie began to nod. She could tell Denny the rest; Denny would not need the beginning explained. But she had started telling Gran, and she wanted Gran to hear the good part too.

They kept turning the shirt between them. The body of it was tightly wrung, but one sleeve hung loose and kept dripping.

“I know, Gran. But I'm not a neither.”

Gran stopped twisting.

“I never was a neither. I'm a both.”

Effie let go with one hand to make the flat palm-drop: truly. The shirt swung. Gran caught the dangling sleeve before it struck the side of the tub.

For a moment she held it and looked at Effie. There was a drop of water on the end of her nose. Effie wanted to laugh at it and was afraid that if she did, Gran would answer the laugh instead of what she had said.

“Well,” Gran said. “Wring your both sleeves, then. They're soaking.”

Effie looked down at her own cuffs. Gran was still holding the shirt's sleeve.

“Mine?”

“Unless you have a third.”

Effie squeezed one cuff over the tub. She had to change hands to do the other. Gran spread the shirt between her hands and inspected it against the light. There was still a mark near the collar.

“Soap on this bit.” Gran brought the collar within reach.

Effie made the little gesture for I know, one moment. She finished with the cuff, took up the soap and rubbed the mark while Gran held the shirt.

Gran did not tell her to stop conducting.

“The other side too,” she said.

Effie turned the collar over.

*   *   *

The opera ran for six years. The argument over it outlasted the run; so did the word, which could appear above a shop and still be useful in a child's mouth. Much later, an interviewer asked the composer which world his work truly belonged to. In the surviving recording there was a pause, a beak-click, and then his two voices answered together.

“Yes.”

Gran did not stop finding things to correct in her granddaughter. But she stopped saying neither. That autumn, when Effie stood beside the washtub with her cuffs pushed up, Gran could ask for her bothwise hands and put one end of a wet sleeve into them.