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Alice blinks. She turns her head curiously to one side. “Does it amuse you to pretend that Neverland was not?”
Did Gyre and Gimble in the Wabe
The acts went by like leaves blowing across the stage. Three young girls in shifts called Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie did an ac
robatic routine, pantomiming any number of things that began with M: mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness. Olive couldn’t imagine how a handful of gymnasts could act out memory or muchness, but when they froze in their tableaux, Olive knew just what they meant, and applauded wildly with everyone else. A pig in a baby-bonnet stood in a lonely spotlight and belted out one long, unbroken oink of agony that lasted nearly two full minutes before he fell to his knees, scream-snorted MOTHER WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME while tears streamed down his porky jowls, then sprang up and bowed merrily while roses flew at him from all directions. A lovely turtle with sad eyes sang a song about soup. It seemed to be a sort of communal thing—anyone could whisper to the gorgeous butterfly master of ceremonies and take the stage, if they felt inclined. There was a bit of a queue forming in the wings. Olive shrank back as a monstrous thing crept onto the boards. He had claws like a great hairy dinosaur and eyes like headlamps and a tail that coiled down over the footlights, casting broken shadows over his violet-green scaled body. His dragon wings were so tall and wide he was obliged to bend and scrunch them to wedge under the half-moon shell of the stage. A couple of fawns pushed a little rickety pianoforte over to him with their dear spotted heads. The monster tinkled out a few experimental runs up and down the keys. Olive could hardly believe his horrid tarantula-talons could manage such graceful scales.
“It’s only a Jabberwock, my dear. You needn’t clutch my hand quite so hard,” said the White Queen. Her face was so serene and crisply carved, like a jeweller had done it.
“A Jabberwock! Like ’twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe? Whiffling through the tulgey wood and that? The Jabberwock?”
The monster at the piano began to play a mournful torch song. He fixed his moony headlamp-eyes on Olive and sang in a gorgeous tenor: I never whiffled, I never; and it weren’t even brillig at all. Nobody gave me no chance to be beamish; I could’ve been someone, if I’ d been born small…
The White Queen frowned at her knitting. “That’s Edward. He’s rather a war hero, don’t you know? He lost his right foot at the Battle of Tulgey Wood, see?” Olive leaned forward—the Jabberwock worked the pedals of his pianoforte with only one crocodile-foot. The other was wrapped in gauze and seeping. The White Queen sighed like a tea kettle boiling. “He’s going to lose the other one in an hour, poor chap.”
Olive blinked. “What? What do you mean he’s going to lose his other one? How do you know?”
Edward belted out: You can take a Wock’s head but you can’t make him crawl! He stopped, leaned his long, whiskered snout over the footlights into the audience, and whispered: “On account of my brain’s being in my tail, yeah? Joke’s on you, O Frabjous Brat!”
“It’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly.
“Oh!” Olive whispered excitedly. “I know this part! Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, right?”
“Will you please be quiet?” growled the striped cat. “Talking during performance is a biting offense.”
The White Queen blushed pinkly. She reached down into the knitting basket at her feet and drew out a toasted crumpet spread generously with raspberry jam. She brushed a bit of wool fluff off of it and offered it to Olive.
“I have learned a few lessons since I was deposed,” she said softly, and with such a tender sadness. “Very occasionally, it costs one nothing to bend the rules.”
Dear Me! A Human child!
Alice stares down at her four neat quails adrift in their sea of golden sauce.
“You can’t be serious,” Peter hisses at her. “This is…this is unkind, Alice. Monstrous, in fact. Why are you doing this to me? What purpose is there in it?”
“I’m not doing any little thing to you, young man. Now, stop it. You needn’t pretend. What was Hook like, really? I always wondered if his stump pained him, at night, in the cold of the sea air.”
“For Christ’s sake, this is madness. You ought to be locked up, not me.”
Alice’s face goes dark and furious and sour.
“Say that to me again, boy. Say it, and I’ ll whip you like the child you are, right here in this lovely restaurant. Don’t think I can’t. I raised three sons and a husband, you know.”
Peter blanches. He feels his blood rebel, not knowing whether to flood his cheeks or flee them. He begins a deep study of his beef. After a time, Alice softens.
“I am sorry—it’s a wonder how many times I’ve said it in such a short while! But I am, I am sorry, Peter, I simply assumed. It was only natural, to my mind. Only logic. I only thought…if for me, then for you. Goose and gander and all that rot. Oh, I never told anyone—my God, how could anyone be told? How could I even begin? But you, you of all people! The moment you introduced yourself I thought that we had veered toward this, careened toward it, that we would converge upon it long before dessert, and at last, I would know someone like me, and you would know someone like you, and what peace we should have then, at the end of it all. Peace, and something nice with butterscotch.”
“Please. You mock me, Mrs. Hargreaves.”
“I do not, Mr. Davies. I make you my confession. In the summer of 1862, something rather astonishing happened to me. I was ten years old. And naturally, when it was all done, I ran at full pelt to tell my best friend all about it just as soon as I could. To my eternal fault, in those days, my best friend was a mathematics professor with a rather large nose and a rather large anxiety complex and an interest in writing.”
The beef tastes like nothing at all. The wine tastes like less than that. He gives up. “It was real,” he says flatly.
“Well, of course it was. Who could make up such a thing?”
Everything’s Got a Moral
The egg brought Olive another indigo martini.
