Robert said, "Sure, this is my baby," patting Bobby on the knee. To
Helen, he muttered, "What does she think, anyway?"
The four stared at Robert and Bobby and Helen in such obvious
confusion that Robert jumped up nervously to turn the sound back on.
* * * * *
After the girls had gone home, Bobby was sent off to bed, and Robert,
loosening his tie, demanded, "What's the matter with them, anyhow? Do
they have to stare at me as if I were a damned biological error? Don't
they know what a man is, for heaven's sake?"
"Really, Robert," Dora protested, blushing a deeper green.
"Well, for gosh sakes--"
"Those names!" Helen said. "Clara Ford, that's not too bad. I'm not so
sure about Mary Maroon."
Dora nodded. "Mary White. Mary Black. So why not Mary Maroon? But
Patricia Pontiac!"
Helen threw up her hands. "They must have made that one up. But _Jack
Jones_!"
"Crazy, if you ask me," Robert said, "pretending they were scared of me
and Bobby."
"There's a Patricia Beauty Shoppe next to the Pontiac agency," Dora
suggested. "Maybe--"
"Funny way to get a name. Where the heck are they from?" Robert
wondered.
"Must be from right here in town," Helen reminded him. "Otherwise they
wouldn't be green."
"You know, the greenness looks sort of natural on them," Dora said
thoughtfully. "Well, think I'll go to bed."
After she had gone, Helen said wistfully in a whisper, "If only awful
things could sort of counteract each other the way some poisons do."
She started making up the davenport bed; Dora had their room. "First
Dora's coming, and our turning green, and now those crazy girls right
next door. But three poisons--no, it wouldn't come out even."
* * * * *
It was a day or two later when Helen found her new neighbors working
in the little flowerbed alongside their house. They were busily
transplanting weeds of the kind responsible for the unpleasant odor.
"For goodness' sake!" Helen exclaimed, disgusted. "What in the world
do you want with that stuff? Why, it took the rest of us here in the
court days to get it all out and now you want to bring it back. Throw
it away!"
"Oh, no!" Patricia Pontiac objected, holding a bunch of the weeds
against her heart protectingly. "It's faneweed!"
"You mean you've seen the stuff before?"
Patricia nodded. "We have it all over where we came from. Must have
faneweed."
"But you couldn't have come from some place else," Helen pointed out.
"You wouldn't be green if you did."
"All green where we come from," Mary Maroon said.
"I don't know where that stuff--faneweed, you call it?--came from,"
Helen said, refusing to pay any attention to their claim that they came
from some place else where everyone was green. There just wasn't any
such place!
"We drop seed other time we come," Patricia said. Then she added
indignantly, "You no believe we come from other place?"
"What other place?" asked Helen, with weary politeness.
"You call it Venus."
"That picture the other night," Clara Ford giggled. "Not like Venus at
all. So funny!"
Helen could stand no more. "So are you!" she said rudely, and went into
the house.
They were even crazier than she'd thought. Greener, too, when you saw
them in broad daylight. Did the greenness affect the mind, and the
greener you got, the zanier you became? Would she get to be like that?
The idea frightened her.
"No turn green?" Patricia Pontiac asked Robert plaintively one day, as
if she were blaming him for her bewilderment.
"No!" he answered shortly. "But I don't blame you for envying us men.
It must be tough to be that lousy-looking color."
"Green is _good_ color!" Mary Maroon declared stoutly. "You no have
baby yourself?"
"Of course not!"