Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page B

Stay alone, Marianne, and do not remember that time. And perhaps, someday, you will find it is forgotten."
    She took her chastened self into the shower and then out for a long, exhausting walk to weary even her tireless brain, a brain which kept trying by an exercise of pure persistence to make her wounds heal by cutting them deeper. For, of course, among all the other monsters was the monster of guilt, guilt which said that she herself had been responsible, not the grown man but herself, the child, the woman who should have known better, for are not women supposed to know better? And if the twelve-year-old Marianne did not know better, then best for the twenty-five-year-old Marianne to work in the quiet library and attend the endless classes and have no male friends at all, for she, too, might not know better if put to the test. She would not go for the weekend, would not allow this feeling to take hold of her, would not allow her calm to be destroyed.
    "Of course," her internal self reminded her, "you are not always so calm, Marianne. Sometimes in the deep night, you waken. Sometimes when the sheets are sensuously soft against your newly bathed skin. Sometimes in the midst of a TV show, when the young man and the young woman look at each other in that way—that way—then you are not so calm."
    "Begone," she said wearily. "Burned, buried, begone." Usually the litany or the long walk let her sleep, but tonight she lay wakeful, dozing from time to time only to start awake again, until she gave up at last and took two of the little red pills Dr.
    Brown had given her. Her sleep was dark, dreamless, empty, and when morning came she was able to convince herself that the night's turmoil had been unreal and that she had not been mired in it at all.
    She could not feel anticipation for the evening. Each time she thought of it, it loomed at the end of her day like a road marker, pointing to some unknown destination, evoking an apprehension not so much for the destination itself as for the unfamiliar and possibly tedious journey it would take to reach it. She was familiar with the feeling, one which had served in the past to limit her society to the few, the necessary, and she felt ashamed of it without in any way being able to defeat it.
    Only when she came into her apartment at the end of the day to see the pot of crocuses on the window seat and feel the absence of the Box did she begin to feel a slight warming, a willingness to be graceful within the confines of her appre-tension—perhaps even a willingness to move outside it toward pleasure if she could find a way.
    "So, Marianne," she instructed herself, "you will not give him a dinner partner to shame him. He has done nothing at all to deserve that." It was a sense of pride which took her through the routines of bam and makeup, hairdress and clothing, and finally to the examination of self in the mirror. The dress had belonged to her mother, a simple, timeless gather of flowing silk, jade green in one light, twilight blue in another, utterly plain. The only dressy clothes she had were things salvaged from among Cloud-haired mama's things, trunks Papa had put in storage in her name, "Because you may want them someday, or may simply want to have them to remember her by." Some had been too fashionable then to be useful now, but there were a few things like this—blouses and shirts, ageless skirts, a topcoat which might have been illustrated in the morning paper, a wonderful sweep of lacy wool stole which would serve as a wrap. The only clothes Marianne had purchased in the last four years had been underwear and two pairs of shoes. Everything else was left over from undergraduate days or made over from Mama's trunks. If it came to a choice between clothing and the tiles for the kitchen.... She smiled. There was no choice.
    She looked good, she decided. Not marvelous or glorious or glamorous, but good. Clean, neat, attractive, and by no means shabby. So.
    Turning then from the