"You're welcome," said Toloth. "Um… for what?"
"For doing your father and me proud," said Mrs. Sickles. "So many young women would have panicked back there, and either frozen or had meltdowns of their own. The way you kept your head was really a delight to see."
"Oh," said Toloth. "Okay, then. Yeah, you're welcome."
«Kept your head,» he remarked to Teresa. «Rather an unfortunate choice of words, if she but knew.»
Teresa giggled appreciatively. «Ask her what she was talking to the Bishop about,» she suggested.
It was, perhaps, a measure of Toloth's continuing degradation that he readily did so, without a word of reprimand to her for presuming in her subservience to dictate his actions. It was, perhaps, another such measure that it didn't occur to him to feel degraded.
"Oh, you noticed that?" said Mrs. Sickles, her eyes twinkling visibly in the rearview mirror. "Well, there were a number of things, actually – the Maccabees, for instance. I thought His Excellency's background might give him an interesting perspective on our little discussion last night – and so it did, though not quite in the way I expected. It turns out, darling, that we were both wrong in our terminology last night; evidently a proper Catholic oughtn't to call the Books of Maccabees either apocryphal or deutero-canonical."
She was stalling, Toloth could tell; there was something else she and the Bishop had discussed that she thought much more immediately relevant than the proper name of a Biblical subdivision. But it would have been completely out of character for Teresa to disregard such a remark, so – "Why not?" he said.
"Well," said Mrs. Sickles, "it seems there's this letter that St. Athanasius wrote to the people of Alexandria one Easter, warning them against heretics the way that good bishops do, and outlining, as best he understood it at the time, which of the various writings floating around were canonical and trustworthy. And he made a threefold distinction: first, he gave a list of what he regarded as the Bible proper, which included most, though not all, of what we would also put there; second, he proposed a sort of in-between, 'recommended reading' category, which was edifying but not strictly canonical; and then he just railed against the other books floating around that the Arians had just made up that morning and passed off as apostolic. And apparently it was this last group that he called apocrypha, and it's the second group – the recommended-reading-but-not-Scripture books – that's properly called deutero-canonical."
"Oh," said Toloth. "And what was in that group?"
"Oh, all kinds of things," said Mrs. Sickles. "Esther, Wisdom, the Didache – it was just a grab bag, evidently. But the point is that it's not a category the Church ended up recognizing, and certainly not the right word for the Greek portions of the Old Testament; that class, it seems, is most properly called the 'Ecclesiastica', after the famous nickname of its most prominent member. Please forgive me for leading you astray."
"No problem," said Toloth vaguely.
Mrs. Chiodini glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. "And was that all His Excellency told you, Catherine?" she said.
"Well," said Mrs. Sickles blithely, "there was a rather interesting story about his sister in Newark who…"
Mr. Sickles cut her off with a groan. "Oh, for the love of Pete," he said. "Trina, dear, I wouldn't trade you for the world, but you can be far too coy for your own good sometimes. Teresa, what your mother is perversely trying not to tell you is that Bishop Perlmutter will be dropping by San Luis Rey to celebrate Mass this afternoon before heading back down to San Diego in the evening."
"Oh, that," said Mrs. Sickles. "Yes, he mentioned that, too. But of course I told him that we probably wouldn't be there, since nothing bores my sweet daughter more than assisting at special Masses presided over by distinguished scholar-converts in miters."
"She's in rare form this morning, isn't she?" Mrs. Chiodini remarked to Toloth. "I'm starting to wonder what they put in those Gingerbread Fancies; she had three of them, you know."
Toloth, busy with his own thoughts, didn't immediately reply. A special Mass – and just the sort, as her mother ironically noted, that the girl he was pretending to be couldn't possibly resist. He might have known.
Oh, well. He ought to be glad it was only an ordinary weekday ceremony; when Malcar got Teresa back on Friday, he gathered, it would be the vigil of Jesus's birth-feast, and she would spend the evening at a mighty and potent solemnity invoking all history in witness to the birth of God's anointed. Compared to that, what harm could this do?
"What time this afternoon?" he said.
And so, when the Sickles family arrived back home, and Toloth went into Teresa's bedroom to change out of her fête costume, he replaced it not with one of her usual weekday outfits, but with a calf-length sheath dress in purple velvet. The contrast, at least to Teresa's eye, was acute, and suffused her brain with a feeling of delighted relief.
«So they make me dress up like Pip the Pixie all morning, but I get to spend the afternoon dolled up in my Sunday best,» she said, as the two of them sat carefully Indian-style on her makeshift bed in the den. «I guess that's fair, don't you, Toloth?»
Toloth, his borrowed nose in the Imitation, grunted noncommittally. «I am no expert on cosmic justice,» he said. «But I have no complaints if you're satisfied.»
«Basically,» said Teresa. «I do wish I had a Sunday dress with a few more ruffles on it; I always feel like a flour sack in something this plain and fitted. But I shouldn't complain; it's what we could find, and it's more than a lot of other people have.»
«No doubt.»
«You know, that's something I've never understood,» Teresa went on. «How come, whenever you see a dress that has a bunch of lace or flowers or whatever on it, it only ever comes in the smallest sizes? What do they want with frills?»
«Envy is an unlovely passion, Teresa,» said Toloth. «I'm sure this Kempis human will come to discuss that point eventually.»
«It's not envy,» said Teresa. «I honestly don't get it. If you have an Audrey Hepburn figure, or a classic hourglass, that's when you want your clothes to be plain, right? You'd want to accentuate your shape, not bury it under a bunch of frou-frou. But if you're a shapeless lump like me, and the only thing that stands out is how much there is of you, then that's what you want to accentuate – make it into a feature instead of a bug. So we should be the ones who get all the puffed sleeves and ribbons, and the Calista Flockhart types who can pull it off should get the plain stuff. But the way they really do it is exactly the opposite of that.»
«Naturally,» said Toloth. «Consider the matter from a fiscal standpoint. The more material in a garment, the more expensive it would be to produce. A smaller garment uses less fabric, so adding extraneous decoration to it is not prohibitive – the more so as, being smaller, it has less surface to decorate in the first place. But one who began with a large garment, and proceeded to cover it with additional material in a quantity suitable to its size, would expend an excessive amount of resources to no practical purpose.»
«Making girls like me feel prettier isn't a practical purpose?» said Teresa.
«Not for a producer of manufactures,» said Toloth. «Practicality to them means a thing that pays.»
«This could pay,» said Teresa. «They'd just have to charge enough. And they wouldn't even have to charge enough for the plus-size dresses themselves; if they made their small dresses nice enough, and advertised them the right way, they could make the money back on those that they spent on the others. Like at McDonald's, where they sell the burgers for a little less than they cost, but the fries and milkshakes for ten times more.»
«Ah,» said Toloth, «but all those things are customarily bought as a unit. If one could rely on always selling a smaller garment along with a larger one, your parallel would be valid, and your manufacturers would likely do as you suggest – or if humans of your proportions were a small minority, perhaps the gamble might then be worthwhile. As things are, it would be simple recklessness; there was a moneylenders' consortium on my world that once tried to do something similar, and that has passed into a proverb for heedless folly.»
There was a few seconds' silence while Teresa digested that. «Well, maybe,» she said at length. «But it doesn't seem right, all the same. It's fine to be economical, but people shouldn't let it keep them from doing things the best way. And I still say it's better to save the extras for those of us who need them.»
«Very well,» said Toloth. «When our Empire has subjugated your world, and I have attained a position on the Council of Thirteen, I will instruct all makers of female human-Controllers' garments never to put extra ornament on anything smaller than a size 13. And now, if you'll excuse me, I would rather like to finish this chapter.»
He had meant it as a mere rebuff; it hadn't occurred to him what Teresa might infer, upon seeing him eager to finish a chapter entitled Of Seeking Peace of Mind and of Spiritual Progress. When, therefore, he felt the young evangelist giggle against his palps, he was mildly annoyed with himself. «Toloth, you put me to shame,» Teresa said. «Here you're trying to read about virtue and asceticism, and I'm distracting you with my vain, worldly complaints. Would you like to slap me?»
«No,» said Toloth, and was surprised to find that he meant it. «All I would like is to be left in peace.»
«Peace,» Teresa repeated. «Okay. I can do that.»
And she fell silent, and the two of them abode in peace for about an hour and a half – she preparing herself to encounter her Maker, he immersing himself in the counsels of a great guide of souls. And so both, when Teresa's mother came to call her to the car, were unwittingly well prepared for what awaited them at the Mission de San Luis Rey.