Devotion, Ep. 8
~ the gothicky soapy family drama ~
****
The shopping was by turns fussy and hilarious, Emmy finally allowing me to buy her a tophat.
But the dressing room hijinks! After all, who was supposed to hook the queen’s bra at the back? You wouldn’t think Emma would squeal like that, but I suspect she did it to see who would freak out first!
All fixed and fitting, giggling as we threw open the drapes, we sure enough saw some flinty faces; but on leaving the boutique, Emma amused me by asking if I’d seen one “liquid look” following us out the door to the street… She dared me to glance behind us but I walked on.
“And did you see how close a few of them were, as if that was the only dressing room available?”
I looked at her, probably a little peaked.
“With hardly a thing in their hands, dear!” She stopped and hugged me.
I did too. But I broke the hug hastily to move us along. From somewhere or everywhere I was hearing new gossip mixed in with the old:
They tried separating those two before … killing those twins to get herself back to those wicked arms … and now again … where was the mother, that’s what I’d … like to cause a caroler to blush in the dark! … what’s her swanky sister doing back…
After Emma turned, daring a loose gaggle to prove anything at all, and scolding them for their New Year’s cheer — suggesting they do something “resolute” — those hypocrites looked sufficiently cowered.
But I wouldn’t be a baby: I turned and hissed at the pearl-clutchers that maybe I would put “a spell” on them … yet my sister simply turned her head and stared me down. We walked off to some rustling tones of vindication.
Not all the townsfolk were like that. Most either didn’t know us, didn’t know of us, or were too busy with their own public displays of affection. When it came to getting a sale on some miniskirts, we encountered no fuddy-duddies. Some hippies were nice and spoke to us, one strawberry blonde laughing and unzipping her jeans while still on the sales floor. Some boys and girls couldn’t believe she’d actually consider a “preppy” miniskirt. I think they were all high.
Elsewhere, when Emmy insisted I get a nightgown, something I rarely wore, one old woman came up and boldly asked Emma, “Is that how she was dressed when she brought out the poison?” It was all getting very weird.
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We carried our shopping bags past some stores the twin girls and I used to go into on our trips to get groceries for Collings House, and it made me too sad to stop in. But soon we were at a seafood restaurant neither of us had been to and we shared a bottle of wine. Sometimes at home I would mix red and white and I couldn’t see why I had to remind people to have fun.
“One day soon we shall have to try some cuddlefish,” said Emmy, wickedly looking up and down the menu. I grinned because I knew she wasn’t spelling it the normal way. I sat there thinking how wonderfully in sync everything was so far, taking the good with the bad. Maybe some kind of “stoned” was going around.
After eating, we bought the new Grand Funk Railroad album and taxied down to the area where I used to work at Sarah’s Teas & Herbals (last summer before being hired on by Penelope Collings as live-in governess for the twins). We knew it from years ago as The Silhouette Shop, for gifts or stationery or something. Mother took us on walks in town back then.
After the tea shop folded, it soon turned into an occult bookstore, and tonight the lights … well, they seemed just a bit too low, as if trying to cater to sinister curiosities among customers both young and old.
For reasons I won’t get into now, Emma and I had decided to avoid the store.
We then made a wrong turn, it seemed, and ended up at a deadend street. The older part of Charlottesville was usually charming, but to me the eaves looked too crooked here, some rooftops leaning in as if lording over the other architectural residents of this cobblestone alley.
“Listen to you!” laughed Emmaleeta. “You sound like one of your old paperback sissy-gothics when you were a girl.”
I came out of my own spell: “Oh… Oh, how old am I? … Emmy, was I talking just now? I-I thought I was thinking …”
Our night on the town was finished when she marched us right up to one of those houses and set about using their phone to call Hulp for a pick-up. As for me, after putting on the kind of ragdoll act I figured someone wanted, I just didn’t feel too well overall and, you know, I thought on the way home that it was because we had yet to spend a quiet evening inside since Emma’s return.
In the “Hulpmobile,” in our backseat, I took out the tophat to make sure it wasn’t crumpled. It was a goofy thing, but if she wore it just once… My beloved grabbed it and placed it on her head, it would take no convincing now. Then she did that imperious thing with her face and said —
“I am your knight on the town.” And I knew how she spelled it, too.
As we pulled up, I realized we were at Hulp’s cottage, not the Manse. He startled us by saying, “I gotta tell you, you two, I figure yer cat Whiskers is ready to come back to ya. I’ll go bring him, ay?”
Emma and I looked at each other. We hadn’t seen the cat in weeks and had forgotten all about it!
