Little, Big by John Crowley Read Free Book Online

said. "Suppose we go in."

An Imaginary  Bedroom
    The screen door was old and large, its wood pierced and turned a bit to summery effect, and the screen potbellied below from years of children's thoughtless egress; when Smoky pulled its porcelain handle, the rusty spring groaned. He stepped across the sill. He was inside.
    The vestibule, tall and polished, smelled of cool trapped night air and last winter's fires, lavender sachets in brass-handled linen closets, what else? Wax, sunlight, collated seasons, the June day outside brought in as the screen groaned and clacked shut behind him. The stairs rose before him and above him, turning a half-circle by stages to the floor above. On the first landing, in the light of a Iancet window there, dressed now in jeans made all of patches, her feet bare, his bride stood. A little behind her was Sophie, a year older now but still not her sister's height, in a thin white dress and many rings.
    "Hi," said Daily Alice.
    "Hi," Smoky said.
    "Take Smoky upstairs," Mrs. Drinkwater said. "He's in the imaginary bedroom. And I'm sure he wants to wash up." She patted his shoulder and he put his foot on the first stair. In later years he would wonder, sometimes idly, sometimes in anguish, whether having once entered here he had ever again truly left; but at the time he just mounted to where she stood, deliriously happy that after a long and extremely odd journey he had at last arrived and that she was greeting him with brown eyes full of promise (and perhaps then this was the journey's only purpose, his present happiness, and if so a good one and all right with him) and taking his pack and his hand and leading him into the cool upper regions of the house.
    "I could use a wash," he said, a little breathless. She dipped her big head near his ear and said, "I'll lick you clean, like a cat." Sophie giggled behind them.
    "Hall," Alice said, running her hand along the dark wainscoting. She patted the glass doorknobs she passed: "Mom and Dad's room. Dad's study—shhh. My room—see?" He peeked in, and mostly saw himself in the tall mirror. "Imaginary study. Old orrery, up those stairs. Turn left, then turn left." The hallway seemed concentric, and Smoky wondered how all these rooms managed to sprout off it. "Here," she said.
    The room was of indiscernible shape; the ceiling sank toward one corner sharply, which made one end of the room lower than the other; the windows there were smaller too; the room seemed larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't decide which. Alice threw his pack on the bed, narrow and spread for summer in dotted swiss. "The bathroom's down the hall," she said. "Sophie, go run some water."
    "Is there a shower?" he asked, imagining the hard plunge of cool water.
    "Nope," Sophie said. "We were going to modernize the plumbing, but we can't find it anymore. . . ."
    "Sophie."
    Sophie shut the door on them.
    First she wanted to taste the sweat that shone on his throat and fragile clavicle; then he chose to undo the tails of her shirt, that she had tied up beneath her breasts; then, but then impatient they forgot about taking turns and quarreled silently, eagerly over each other, like pirates dividing treasure long sought, long imagined, long withheld.

In the  Walled Garden
    Alone together at noon they ate peanut-butter and apple sandwiches in the walled garden at the back front of the house.
    "The back front?"
    Opulent trees looked over the gray garden wall, like calm spectators leaning on their elbows. The stone table they sat at, in a corner beneath a spreading beech, was marked with the coiled stains left by caterpillars crushed in other summers; their cheerful paper plates lay on its thickness flimsy and ephemeral. Smoky struggled to clear his palate; he didn't usually eat peanut-butter.
    "This used to be the front," Daily Alice said. "Then they built the garden and the wall; so the back became the front. It was a front anyway. And now this is the back front."