Dusssie Read online

  Even before I felt Mom’s knuckles nudge me in the back, I knew that this was what I was supposed to not be afraid of. “Greetings, Sphinx,” I said shakily.

  A ripple of womanly laughter, approving and amused, washed around me. On top of another boulder I saw something with the head and arms and breasts of a woman but the body of a huge, thick snake. Atop a third boulder I saw a woman standing on all fours, her hands serving as forelegs, her haunches those of a dragon. And flying down out of the crescent moon came another birdwoman, this one with spiky white feathers around her neck. And then another, spreading black wings, and more, landing on the rocks or standing between the trees until I lost track of how many, until I heard my mother saying, “Are we all here?”

  “Siren can’t make it. She has a gig,” somebody said.

  “She’s a nightclub singer,” Mom said to me, and then she started making introductions as if this cold, moonlit hill were our living room and I had walked in while she was having some friends over. “Everyone, I’d like you to meet my daughter. Dusie, sweetheart, take your scarf off.” She wanted them to see the evidence, I guess. Pressing my lips together to keep from saying anything rude, I yanked the covering off my head, but my snakes just huddled on my scalp, cowering. Which was pretty much what I felt like doing at the time.

  “Everyone, this is my daughter, Medusa,” Mom announced. She turned to me. “Honey, you’ve already met Sphinx—she’s a Grecian sphinx, not Egyptian, and she’s a Broadway consultant. And here are the Lamia sisters.” Mom nudged me toward the serpent woman and the dragon woman, both of whom nodded at me. “They are performance artists. It’s not a coincidence that we’re all here in New York; many of us are members of the artistic community.”

  I heard Aunt Stheno mutter, “As if I’m a sculptor?” Aunt Stheno worked as a bookkeeper. But all of a sudden I realized that probably some of Mom’s “works of art” were really Aunt Stheno’s petrified people. I mean, she used to do it, too, right?

  Or maybe—maybe she still did?

  “Stop,” I whispered to myself, feeling like I couldn’t take much more.

  Mom continued as if she hadn’t heard. “The Eumenides sisters. Nemesis is a member of the American Academy of Poetry.” Turning to me again, she smiled at the winged woman who had landed first, and I winced again at the sight of those big, scaly bird feet with thick gray claws.

  She must have seen me looking, because she said, “It’s amazing what you can hide under a caftan.” Her voice was ancient, as dry and warm as bones bleaching in the desert sun.

  I blushed so hotly that my snakes squirmed. “Um, excuse me,” I whispered.

  “Not at all, little daughter. Take a good look, and be grateful for your own pretty feet.”

  “And be grateful you don’t have wings,” added the Lamia with the dragon tail and, yes, bat wings.

  Several voices agreed that wings were the worst. “Almost impossible to hide them,” said the other Lamia, the anaconda look-alike.

  “And feathers,” said the birdwoman with the spiky white ruff. “What a curse, how they itch.”

  “Your snakes will itch only when they shed their skins,” Aunt Stheno told me kindly.

  “At least none of her snakes are poisonous,” said Mom.

  “Good!” said Nemesis. “Little Medusa, be grateful—”

  I felt grateful for nothing and I could not stand to hear another word of this. I yelled, “Stop it!”

  They fell silent, except for Mom, who said, “Dusie, we’re just trying to help.”

  “I don’t want help to be a freak!”

  Freak! Freak! Freak, echoed away between the rocks before a honeyed growl said, “What do you want, daughter of Gorgon?”

  I turned to the Sphinx with Mom’s warning fingers nudging my back. No need. I couldn’t speak.

  The Sphinx said, “You would rather be such a freak as Aphrodite, perhaps? Or Athena?”

  My mouth opened twice before I managed to whisper, “They’re still around?”

  “Of course. They’re immortals, too.”

  “But—but where?”

  “Hollywood.”

  In a voice like asphalt Nemesis said, “No substantial poetry comes out of them.”

  I felt the glittering gaze of the Sphinx on me, even though I couldn’t bear to look directly at her as she said, “They are freaks, too. They are freaks of beauty, that is all. And I am here to tell you, Medusa, there is more to becoming a woman than being pretty. I ask you again: what is it that you want?”

  By the chill in my spine and the coiled stillness of my snakes I knew I had to answer. “I—I want Troy to be okay again.”

  They all knew what had happened. I’d heard Mom on the phone, filling them in when she’d called the meeting.

  “You are concerned with the fate of the boy?” The Sphinx sounded sublimely indifferent. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to hurt people!”

  “She is half-human,” Mom said from behind my back. “She has compunction. She feels she has done something wrong.”

  “Nonsense,” said the Sphinx in the same tone, ancient and stony. “Conscience has nothing to do with us, little Medusa. Forget the boy. He can do you no harm.”

  “But what if …”

  “No ifs. Remember, I am the Sphinx, and I know. He will lie there without speaking until he grows old and dies.”

  I felt a chill like a desert night falling.

  “Dismiss him from your mind, young Medusa,” the Sphinx went on. “I asked you what you want. Before any of this happened, what was the deepest wish of your heart?”

  And I thought: Troy.…

  Forget soft kisses. Forget all those dreams of true love.

  Tears stung my eyes as I blurted out the truth. “I want someone … like him, a boy, I mean … someone special.”

  “She wants a sweetheart,” someone whispered, and a murmur went around the Sisterhood.

  “That’s what we all want.”

  “Kind eyes and a warm heart.”

  “She just wants love, that’s all.”

  “True love.”

  Yes. Yes, that special love was what I had always dreamed of. I knew I wasn’t worthy yet, but if I could learn enough about clothes and makeup and how to act, if I could grow pretty enough, then maybe someday—

  The Sphinx spoke, her lioness voice gentler. “But in this, too, we can help you, little daughter.”

  My dream shattered like glass breaking. Freaks, calling me daughter? I wanted to scream, stamp my feet, hit something. My mind went red with rage so fiery it warmed my snakes and woke them. I felt them rear, heard them hissing like ticked-off alley cats. I snaked my neck as I swung around, peering at a circle of monster women in the dark. “Look at you!” I cried at all of them. I turned on my mother. “Look at you! What a life, hiding your snakes, your teeth, your nails, pretending to be normal. Well, you’re not. You’re not even a real sculptor. You’re a fake. You’re a poser.”

  In a tone so steely that I knew I had hurt her, she said, “I am a real gorgon.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be a gorgon!”

  If “becoming a woman” meant growing up to be another one of—of my Mom—no. No. I felt like I had to hurt her, to get away from her. I felt like I was fighting for my life. “I don’t want to be like you! Any of you!” I yelled, glaring at all of them. “I’m not going to be like you!” My voice broke with the weight of emotion it carried, because nobody would ever love me now, nobody could love a monster. Unless …

  In that moment I knew what I had to do. I said, “I am going to lose these snakes.”

  Silence, except for a hissy sort of tee-hee-hee inside my head. My snakes were laughing.

  “I mean it.” There had to be a way to get rid of them. And I would find it. I would make it happen.

  I would do it. Even though my rage had whooshed out of me and left me trembling, even while the snakes quivered with laughter on my head, I knew bone-deep that I needed to keep trying unt
il I found a way to be myself and not my mother’s daughter.

  “I mean it,” I said again, as quiet as the moon now.

  There was a sigh from the Sisterhood that felt like “Amen.” Then the Sphinx growled, and I turned to her.

  As if she needed to see something inward, she narrowed her topaz eyes, her gaze heavy-lidded, shadowed. Somehow this made her even scarier than before, so fearsome that I took a step back. Yet when she spoke, her deep-chested voice came out calm, almost kind.

  She said: “To lose, you must win, and to win, you must loosen, Medusa. I foresee that you will walk this way again.” She opened her eyes. “Euryale, take her home.”

  I glanced at my mother, then stared. Under the shadow of her turban, Mom’s face looked like a carving in white marble. “Sphinx, what riddle is this?” she whispered.

  But the Sphinx answered only, “Bring her back when the maiden moon shines again.”

  And when I looked to the top of the boulder, the Sphinx was gone.

  FOUR

  Even though I had been up really late, the next morning when the SoHo branch library opened, there I was waiting at the door. With a big ugly babushka tied over my head, in my sloppiest old bib overalls, I stood there like a homeless person eager to get in for the day to stay out of the cold.

  Only warmth wasn’t what I wanted. I was there for info I couldn’t find on the Internet. Surely a real library would have a book just for me. Maybe something in the hygiene section: Eliminating Dandruff, Head Lice, and Scalp Snakes. Or Little-Known Side Effects of Puberty. Or something in how-to, like Reptile Removal for Dummies: Rid Your Head of Troublesome Serpents.

  It’sss no ussse, one of my snakes told me, sounding smug.

  you’re ssstuck with usss, agreed another one.

  “We’ll see about that,” I muttered. A crazy homeless person talking to herself.

  Okay, trying to be real about this, I knew I needed to know a lot more about snakes before I could even begin to figure out how to get rid of my headful. I mean, just calling an exterminator wouldn’t work under the circumstances. I was going to have to come up with a plan myself, and so far, all I knew was that at least one of my snakes was hungry for crayfish. I knew this because I had actually slept for a little while the night before, and during that time I had crawled through grass and mud along a stream, stuck my head under the water, and gulped raw soft-shelled baby crayfish in my dreams. Ick.

  It was Saturday morning, so there were not many people at the library yet. Kids liked to sleep in on Saturday. They wouldn’t start showing up to work on their term papers till afternoon.

  When the doors opened, I scuttled in without looking at anybody, heading for a computer. SEARCH BY SUBJECT: SNAKES. I managed to come up with a couple of call numbers, then headed for the stacks.

  There. A whole shelf full of books on snakes.

  And right in front of them stood a skinny old bony-faced man. I mean old. All bent over like a rusty fire escape falling down. He wore pleated pants hiked up practically to his armpits by bright red suspenders, with a starchy white shirt ballooning out around them. Totally and majorly in my way, he stood staring up from under his hunchback at the snake books.

  My snake books. I needed them.

  I shoved in front of the old man and started grabbing books before he could get them.

  Like, rude. I was being so rude I thought he would move away. But he didn’t. He stayed right where he was, like his big feet in their old-man leather shoes were stuck to the tile. “Goodness,” he said, “you must really like snakes.”

  I ignored him, piling books into my arms: The World of Snakes, The Encyclopedia of Snakes, Snakes of North America.

  “I do, too,” the old man talked on, his voice warm and high and breezy like a summer sky. “I think they’re fascinating creatures, the way they walk without legs and swim without fins.”

  I felt my snakes stir in silent approval, like cats purring without making sound.

  The old man continued to talk. “Every term I audit a course at NYU, and I’m trying to decide whether to take herpetology next, or history of architecture.”

  But he was way too old. Surprised out of my silence, I looked at him. “You go to school?”

  I guess he’d been taller once, but bent over by age, he was just my height. He nodded, gazing back at me with pale, eager eyes. “I’ve been taking courses every spring and fall since I retired. In twenty-two years I’ve taken forty-four courses.”

  “But … but what for?”

  “To learn. I enjoy it. And the college kids keep me young.” He smiled all over his sharp face. “Last term I took Writing Personal Poetry. I didn’t do very well. The instructor said I wrote political essays that rhymed. But I had a wonderful time. Where do you go to school?”

  Probably I didn’t anymore. Mom had arranged for me to go see some shrink she knew on Monday, and he was supposed to let her know whether I was sane or not, but also give me a medical excuse. To Mom this was no big deal, because she didn’t understand about school, or think I needed it. I mean, she was the next best thing to a goddess, so she’d learned everything she needed to know on her own, without teachers, and for friends, she had the Sisterhood. But me—you’d think I would be glad not to have to go to school, but I wasn’t. I mean, what was I supposed to do all day, chat on the Internet? Even if I were allowed—which I wasn’t—it just wouldn’t be the same as—friends, what was I going to tell my friends? I still hadn’t explained anything to Hunter or Keisha or Stephe or—or anybody. I couldn’t tell them the truth, but I didn’t want to lie to them, and as far as going anyplace with them, forget it.

  Was I even going to have any friends anymore?

  I didn’t answer the old guy’s question. I turned my back on him and walked away with my armload of snake books. Rude. I felt like being rude.

  “Happy reading!” he called after me.

  Right. Sure.

  Safe at home, I threw the babushka in a corner and grabbed myself something to eat. Actually, a lot to eat. Two shrimp egg rolls, cold cuts, a tuna salad sandwich, three chicken empanadas, and half a calzone. I didn’t know why I was so hungry.

  Ratsss, somebody in my head urged. Don’t you have any sssucculent young ratsss?

  “Ick!” Okay, I did know why I was so hungry, but not for cereal bars or fruit salad. I was chowing down like a pregnant woman because I had to feed the snakes as well as myself. And the snakes were carnivores.

  Forgsss? asked somebody else, sounding all green with longing. Newtsss?

  “Listen,” I complained, “I’m not an ecosystem.” I finished up with some mint cookies and a dish of butter-pecan ice cream just for me. What a pig-out. I was going to be as big as a bus if I kept this up. After clearing away some of the evidence, I settled in the front room and started to read.

  At first it was boring. Snakes took their body temperature from the environment. (Yawn.) Because they didn’t spend their own energy keeping warm, they didn’t have to eat much. (You wouldn’t know it from listening to my bunch.) This made them good at living in deserts. (I wished mine would go to a desert and stay there.) Snakes could see pretty well, but they wouldn’t notice you if you didn’t move. (Ho-hum.) They smelled and tasted prey with their tongues. (No, duh.) They couldn’t hear much, just felt vibrations. Having no external ears, snakes were about 90 percent deaf—

  Right there I stopped being bored and got a real creepy feeling. Okay, my snakes could feel vibrations, but no way could they actually listen to me talking, not so as to understand the words.

  Okay, I knew I was hearing their thoughts, but, color me clueless, up till then I hadn’t really understood that they were hearing mine.

  Not hear, Ssstupid, said the regal voice in my head. We are your thoughtsss.

  What was that supposed to mean?

  We are the dark and sssecret cranny dwellersss of your mind.

  Oh, give me a break! I threw down the book with a bang just as Mom came zipping in on her way from so
meplace to someplace else. What the heck did she do all day, anyway, if she wasn’t sculpting statues? Where was she going in such a hurry, for a pedicure? Were her toenails bronze, too? I sooo did not feel like asking her any of this, and when I whammed my book down, she gave me a wary look. “Dusie, what was that all about?”

  “Nothing.”

  On my head I felt the snakes—active, crawling. I’d vibrated them.

  Mom asked, “What are you reading?”

  “Nothing, Mom.”

  Mom hadn’t said a word about my dissing her in front of all her freak friends, but I had a feeling she was not happy with me. Which made me feel bad, but at the same time mad at her, too. I mean, she was my mother. She was supposed to protect me. Somehow she should have kept all this from happening. She had lied to me, or at least she hadn’t told me the truth. I had always looked up to her but now she had let me down, so she could just keep her distance, thank you very much.

  Which she did. She went away somewhere, and I picked up another book and kept reading. Or tried to keep reading. My cell started ringing. First it was Hunter wanting to know whether I was feeling any better. I told her I just had cramps. She said I was missing all the excitement, everybody was totally freaked after what had happened to Troy Lindquist, like, was it going to happen to somebody else? I had to make an excuse and get off the phone, I felt so bad. Like, guilty. And then Catie with a C called, and Stephe, and Keisha, and I kept feeling more and more miserable. It was weird. You’d think I’d be glad to hear from my friends, but instead I felt more and more awful because I wasn’t one of them anymore and they didn’t even know it. They treated me the same as before, and after a while I couldn’t stand it. I turned off the phone.

  I couldn’t read anymore, either. I just wandered around the apartment for I don’t know how long. Finally, I went to Mom’s bedroom and borrowed her big antique hand mirror—everything Mom owned was either ultramodern or antique, nothing in-between. I took the mirror to the kitchen table. Also a notebook, a fluorescent green gel pen, and Snakes of North America.