Page 44 of If Looks Could Kill

“Their sins against women. Their ten thousand exploitations,” she says. “Men’s treacherous hearts can’t confront their shame. They convict and kill themselves, you might say.”

“I don’t understand,” Pearl says. “Not all men are… so bad.”

“Humph,” replies Stella. “From the cradle to the grave, the work of giving a man life, and giving him the life he wants, is performed by women. Is it not?”

Pearl shifts uncomfortably. “If you’re speaking of childbirth, that’s just nature.”

“His nursing,” Miss Stella continues. “His meals, his clothes, his washing, his home, his pleasures, his children, his care when sick. The weavers and workers in his mills and factories. The thousand unpleasant tasks that make great deeds possible. Almost all performed by women. He’ll rule over them all, and he’ll feel entitled to.

He’ll view them with contempt while enjoying their bodies when the mood suits him.

And that’s just the men society would call ‘decent.’?” She laughs mirthlessly.

“You only need look around this city to see what the rest are capable of. But know that, king or pauper, it’s a woman who’ll wipe his bottom at his beginning and at his end. ”

“His rear end,” says Pearl, surprising even herself.

Miss Stella smiles. “They rationalize it away, oh, how they do, but make no mistake: men know their lives—every minute of their lives—are on loan to them from the unfair, unpaid or underpaid, unappreciated toil of women. And they can’t live in that imbalance without knowing, deep in the gut, that one day, the bill might come due.

Women might rise up in their wrath.” She leans forward in her chair. “Or send a champion to do it for them.”

When this statement produces no reaction, she resumes her rocking. “I did once meet a man,” she concedes, “whom I couldn’t stun.”

“Oh?” asks Pearl. “Why not?”

Miss Stella shrugs. “I’m not sure,” she says. “He was a quiet sort of man. One of your passive do-gooders who wouldn’t raise his voice at a mouse. A Quaker, as I recall.”

Pearl frowns. “Why did you want to stun this, er, quiet Quaker?”

Miss Stella blinks at Pearl in surprise. “Why, to see if I could.”

But you couldn’t, Pearl thinks with no small satisfaction.

“My father was a kind man,” Pearl says. “Always gentle to me and my mother. Always did his own work, where possible, to spare my mother any pain.”

Miss Stella’s needles pause. “?‘Was,’?” she says. “I’m sorry you lost such a fine father.”

Thank goodness, thinks Pearl, he didn’t live to see me turn into this.

“But for every sweet man like him, two more are brutes and monsters.” Miss Stella’s needles resume. “You’re old enough to know what I mean.”

Pearl presses her fingertips together to keep her hands from trembling.

“Somewhere, tonight, in this city, lies the man who did this to you,” Miss Stella explains. “I think of him as a vector. A maker of Medusas. He became one when—and this is important— when a powerful Medusa tried to kill him and couldn’t do it. ”

A vector?

Pearl rises. “How do you mean, couldn’t do it?” she asks. “Did she… lose her nerve?”

Miss Stella shakes her head. “No. I mean, she hurled at him all her fury—like the executioner, wielding an axe—and it wouldn’t penetrate.

So to speak. Where there should’ve been flesh, there was steel.

Where there should’ve been a human conscience, some capacity for guilt or fear or shame, there wasn’t. ”

Pearl struggles to absorb this idea. “That means men like that would be—”

“The most dangerous men of all,” supplies Miss Pearl.

“And that produces a… a person whose touch creates new Medusas?”

“As far as I can make out, it’s the only way we are created.”

Pearl’s head reels. “This,” she whispers, “is beyond bizarre. It beggars belief.”

Miss Pearl ignores the critique. “It serves as a check upon us,” she says. “A Medusa mustn’t be too quick to kill. Too indiscriminate. What if she makes another of these men?”

Pearl sinks back into her chair. “He can’t be killed.”

“Oh, I’m sure he can be in more ordinary ways.”

“But he’s immune to… what we do.”

Miss Stella unravels a stitch. “Partially, I expect. You can still stun him. Frighten him.”

“So this man ,” Pearl says, “can just go about, ruining life after life.”

“Think of it this way,” Miss Stella explains. “He has nowhere to hide. He sows his own destruction. The stones underfoot become land mines, if you will, to blow him to pieces.”

Pearl refuses to accept this. “And he leaves behind him girls whose lives are—”

“Electrified,” Stella says. “Graced with power so they need never bow to a man again .”

The tentacled arms of Pearl’s dream encircle her. Yes. Yes. Never again.

Imagine if, on that day, so long ago, she had been as she is now. Imagine how her life would be different today.

But if so, she might never have found the heavenly grace she received in the aftermath.

Far better to have never needed it. And where, indeed, was that grace now?

Stella sets aside her knitting and rises from her chair. “I trust you know that the bitterest blows of life can strengthen us,” she says quietly. “You’ve joined a chosen sisterhood.”

Pearl tries to clear the fog from her brain. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Are you saying… do you mean it’s a good thing, when a girl, like me, becomes a Medusa?” She watches Miss Stella’s placid expression in disbelief. “You’re in favor of a world with many more of us?”

Miss Stella pauses. “I grant, an all-out Medusa trend might arouse the wrong attention.”

Pearl wants to scream. You think it’s just fine, what has happened to me.

“It’s true,” Miss Stella says, “that many newly hatched Medusas don’t survive for long.” She shakes her head. “But those who do, the strong and intelligent ones, like you, go on to greatness.”

“And as for the others…?”

Miss Stella’s voice is gravelly. “It can’t be helped.”

Many newly hatched Medusas don’t survive for long.

Miss Stella takes Pearl’s hands in hers. “I can teach you,” she whispers. “I can help you.”

Pearl has no response to this.

“Forgive me,” Miss Stella says shyly. “I know we’ve only just met tonight, but… I am old. Time is fleeting. I feel for you, my dear. I do. We could help each other.”

This idea is so opaque to Pearl that she can barely comprehend the older woman’s words.

“I daresay your former life is closed to you,” Miss Stella whispers. “But you can make your home here. We can make it comfortable.”

Live here ? Pearl glances around at the cobwebby shadows.

“Think nothing of the expense,” Miss Stella adds. “We can redecorate. Your friends can visit. Come and go as you please. Throw parties. Hire cooks and musicians. Order gowns.”

Pearl pictures the rooms papered and painted and furnished. Her nightgown, a ball gown.

“You lose nothing,” Stella says, “and gain everything.”

“And the people trying to kill me?” Pearl whispers. “The man who did this to me?”

“We will deal with them easily.” She cradles Pearl’s hands gently in her own. “I never wanted a husband,” she says confidingly, “but I did always wish for a daughter. Someone to leave all of this to, when I am gone.”

Pearl has a mother, back home. They are not, it’s true, deeply close.

So many gulfs between them—the loss of Pearl’s father, then her brother.

Their poverty. Her mother’s reaction when Pearl told her, years later, what had happened to her that day.

The pained way her mother looked at her for a long time afterward.

They had never fit each other, and now there wasn’t enough room in Pennsylvania, much less in their small farmhouse, for their sadness to live side by side.

Stella’s snakes watch Pearl languidly as their mistress waits for Pearl’s reply.

“I don’t know,” Pearl says slowly. “I… May I think about it?”

A sound from downstairs breaks the stillness. A rattling, banging, jangling sound, followed by men’s low voices. Miss Stella’s snakes rise up, hissing a warning.

“That, I believe,” says Miss Stella, “will be the ruffians chasing you. I hoped you’d evaded them in coming here. Someone must have watched your movements after all.”

Stella sounds almost excited, but fear stabs at Pearl. She clutches the old woman’s arm. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she whispers. “Is there another way out? I’ve got to go wake Freyda and Cora, and—”

“Nothing of the kind.” Stella pats her hand. “Wait here.”