No one stirred. “Elphaba?” said Madame Morrible again, adjusting her bangles and pressing two fingers at the bottom of her throat.
The girl was in the back of the room, a pauper in a red dress with gaudy fretwork, and in clumpy, old-people’s boots. At first Galinda thought what she saw was some trick of the light, a reflection off the adjacent buildings covered in vines and flatmoss. But as Elphaba moved forward, lugging her own carpetbags, it became obvious that she was green. A hatchet-faced girl with putrescent green skin and long, foreign-looking black hair. “A Munchkinlander by birth, though with many childhood years spent in Quadling Country,” read Madame Morrible from her notes. “How fascinating for us all, Miss Elphaba. We shall look forward to hearing tales of exotic climes and times. Miss Galinda and Miss Elphaba, here are your keys. You may take room twenty-two on the second floor.”
She smiled broadly at Galinda as the girls came forward. “Travel is so broadening,” she intoned. Galinda started, the curse of her own words lobbed back at her. She curtseyed and fled. Elphaba, eyes on the floor, followed behind.
2
By the time Ama Clutch arrived the next day, her foot bandaged to three times its natural size, Elphaba had already unpacked her few belongings. They hung raglike on hooks in the cupboard: thin, shapeless shifts, shamed into a corner by the fulsome hoops and starched bustles and padded shoulders and cushioned elbows of Galinda’s wardrobe. “I am happy as cheese to be your Ama too, don’t matter to me,” said Ama Clutch, smiling broadly in Elphaba’s direction, before Galinda had a chance to get Ama Clutch alone and demand that her minder refuse. “Of course my Papa is paying you to be my Ama,” said Galinda meaningfully, but Ama Clutch answered, “Not as much as all that, duckie, not as much as all that. I can be making up my own mind.”
“Ama,” said Galinda when Elphaba had left to use the mildewy facilities, “Ama, are you blind? That Munchkinlander girl is green.”
“Odd, isn’t it? I thought all Munchkinlanders were tiny. She’s a proper height, though. I guess they come in a variety of sizes. Oh, are you bothered by the green? Well, it might do you some good, if you let it. If you let it. You affect worldly airs, Galinda, but you don’t know the world yet. I think it’s a lark. Why not? Why ever not?”
“It’s not yours to organize my education, worldly or otherwise, Ama Clutch!”
“No, my dear,” said Ama Clutch, “you’ve made this mess all by your lonesome. I’m merely being of service.”
So Galinda was stuck. Last night’s brief interview with Madame Morrible had not provided any escape route, either. Galinda had arrived promptly, in a dotted morpheline skirt with lace bodice, a vision, as she’d said to herself, in nocturnal purples and midnight blues. Madame Morrible bade her enter the reception room, in which a small cluster of leather chairs and a settee were drawn up before an unnecessary fire. The Head poured mint tea and offered crystallized ginger wrapped in pearlfruit leaves. She indicated a chair for Galinda, but herself stood by the mantelpiece like a big game hunter.
In the best tradition of the upper-class savoring its luxuries, they sipped and nibbled in silence at first. This gave Galinda the chance to observe that Madame Morrible was fishlike not merely in countenance, but in dress: Her loose-fitting cream foxille flowed like a huge airy bladder from the high frilled neckline to the knees, where it was tightly gathered and dropp
ed straight to the floor, hugging the calves and ankles in neat, anticlimactic pleats. She looked for all the world like a giant carp in a men’s club. And a dull, bored carp at that, not even a sentient Carp.
“Now your Ama, my dear. The reason she is incapable of supervising a dormitory. I’m all ears.”
Galinda had taken all afternoon to prepare. “You see, Madame Head, I didn’t like to say it publicly. But Ama Clutch suffered a terrible fall last summer when we were picnicking in the Pertha Hills. She reached for a handful of wild mountain thyme and went pitching over a cliff. She lay for weeks in a coma, and when she emerged she had no memory of the accident at all. If you asked her about it, she wouldn’t even know what you meant. Amnesia by trauma.”
“I see. How very tiresome for you. But why does this make her unequal to the job I proposed?”
“She has become addled. Ama Clutch, on occasion, gets confused as to what has Life and what doesn’t. She will sit and talk to, oh, say, a chair, and then relate its history back to us. Its aspirations, its reservations—”
“Its joys, its sorrows,” said Madame Morrible. “How truly novel. The emotional life of furniture. I never.”
“But, silly as this is, and a cause for hours of merriment, the corollary ailment is more alarming. Madame Morrible, I must tell you that Ama Clutch sometimes forgets that people are alive. Or animals.” Galinda paused, then added, “Or Animals, even.”
“Go on, my dear.”
“It is all right for me, because Ama has been my Ama all my life, and I know her. I know her ways. But she can sometimes forget a person is there, or needs her, or is a person. Once she cleaned a wardrobe and tipped it over onto the houseboy, breaking his back. She didn’t register his screaming right there, right at her feet. She folded the nightclothes and had a conversation with my mother’s evening gown, asking it all sorts of impertinent questions.”
“What a fascinating condition,” said Madame Morrible. “And how vexing for you, really.”
“I couldn’t have allowed her to accept responsibility for fourteen other girls,” Galinda confided. “For me, alone, there is no problem. I love the foolish old woman, in a way.”
Madame Morrible had said, “But what of your roomie? Can you jeopardize her well-being?”
“I didn’t ask for her.” Galinda looked the Head in her glazed, unblinking eye. “The poor Munchkinlander appears to be used to a life of distress. Either she will adjust or, I assume, she will petition you to be removed from my room. Unless, of course, you feel it your duty to move her for her own safety.”
Madame Morrible said, “I suppose if Miss Elphaba cannot live with what we give her, she will leave Crage Hall on her own accord. Don’t you think?”
It was the we in what we give her: Madame Morrible was binding Galinda into a campaign. They both knew it. Galinda struggled to maintain her autonomy. But she was only seventeen, and she had suffered that same indignity of exclusion in the Main Hall just hours ago. She didn’t know what Madame Morrible could have against Elphaba except the looks of her. But there was something, there was clearly something. What was it? She sensed it to be wrong somehow. “Don’t you think, dear?” said Madame Morrible, bowing a bit forward like a fish arching in a slow-motion leap.
“Well, of course, we must do what we can,” said Galinda, as vaguely as possible. But she seemed the fish, and caught on a most clever hook.
Out of the shadows of the reception room came a small tiktok thing, about three feet high, made of burnished bronze, with an identifying plate screwed into its front. The plate said Smith and Tinker’s Mechanical Man, in ornate script. The clockwork servant collected the empty teacups and whirred itself away. Galinda didn’t know how long it had been there, or what it had heard, but she had never liked tiktok creatures.
Elphaba had a bad case of what Galinda called the reading sulks. Elphaba didn’t curl up—she was too bony to curl—but she jackknifed herself nearer to herself, her funny pointed green nose poking in the moldy leaves of a book. She played with her hair while she read, coiling it up and down around fingers so thin and twiglike as to seem almost exoskeletal. Her hair never curled no matter how often Elphaba twined it around her hands. It was beautiful hair, in an odd, awful way, with a shine like the pelt of a healthy giltebeest. Black silk. Coffee spun into threads. Night rain. Galinda, not given to metaphor on the whole, found Elphaba’s hair entrancing, the more so because the girl was otherwise so ugly.
They didn’t talk much. Galinda was too busy forging alliances with the better girls who had been her rightful roomie prospects. No doubt she could switch rooms at half-term, or at any rate next fall. So Galinda left Elphaba alone, and she flew down the hall to gossip with her new friends. Milla, Pfannee, Shenshen. Just as in children’s books about boarding school, each new friend was wealthier than the one before.
