Page 72 of If Looks Could Kill
She turns toward the stairs and makes her dignified way there, walking stick in hand.
Pearl doesn’t want to talk to this strange woman, but to say no seems appallingly rude.
Slowly down the sweeping staircase the processional descends, one precise step at a time. Pearl hangs back. I’m a bride, she thinks perversely. A debutante, making a grand entrance. This old nightdress is my party gown. The downstairs ghosts are my guests.
Miss Stella crosses to the front parlor, where she settles into her rocking chair. Pearl locates another chair in the dining room and sets it near Miss Stella. Miss Stella’s rocking chair creaks. Pearl stuffs her hands underneath her thighs to stop them from fidgeting.
“Today is your first day?”
Pearl gulps and nods. “Yes.”
“And your heart is breaking.”
Pearl feels split open like a flounder on a fishmonger’s cutting board.
Miss Stella takes Pearl’s hand. The skin draped over her birdlike bones is as soft as silk.
“Be strong,” Miss Stella murmurs. “This agony is not forever.”
She, however, looks as though she has lived forever.
She resumes her rocking. “Have you read any myths about Medusa?”
“No,” says Pearl. “I didn’t ever read that sort of thing.”
“I wouldn’t put much stock in what most of them say,” Miss Stella adds indignantly. “Written by men, millennia later. Much of it pure rubbish.”
Until today, Pearl would’ve stoutly declared that all of it was. Every pagan word.
“Medusa was beheaded by the demigod Perseus,” the older woman says bitterly, “with the help of the goddess Athena, who made the first Medusa herself. Shameful.”
Pearl doesn’t believe in Greek gods, but then, she doesn’t believe in herself, either.
“If any of it’s true,” Miss Stella adds. “Words are men’s sharpest weapons against us.”
Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me,Pearl’s pastor had said.
“They say Medusa was a mortal Gorgon, but those she lived with, Stheno and Euryale, wereimmortal.” A small laugh rasps in Miss Stella’s throat. “Which immortal monstersdidn’tdie if beheaded?”
“Um…”
“Excepting the hydra,” Miss Stella says. “Of courseMedusa was immortal.”
Once names like Stheno enter in, Pearl is lost in a foreign country. Until—
“Wait,” she says. “Did you saywe are immortal?”
Miss Stella smiles. “No, dear. Not we.” She leans in and whispers, “But I amone hundred and forty years old.”
Pearl doesn’t believe it.
Miss Stella’s pride masks her disappointment that Pearl hasn’t marveled at her age.
She is a lonely old woman, Pearl tells herself. Have pity. “Then you must remember—”
“The War of Independence?” the old woman cuts in. “Like yesterday.I once danced with Aaron Burr!” She reaches for a basket of knitting. “I’ll die eventually. I certainly age. But I imagine that, for my age, I’m looking rather spry.”
A breath of laughter escapes Pearl in spite of herself.
