“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, back to the land?” I said.
My tongue felt like soybean mush. A substitute.
“Real honest farming,” said Mr. Peterson. Uncle Bob. It was astonishing how his affected vocabulary had dropped from him, as if it had been a disguise no longer needed. “A mule and some goats and a flock of hens for eggs. Our own woods to supply our own firewood. Water from our own springs. Strawberries fresh from our own field. Asparagus rows, orchards, vegetable patches, fields of corn.”
“A mule?” I repeated. I don’t believe this, I thought. A mule? An hysterical giggle began to percolate in my chest. What would I say to Joel, for whom civilization was downtown?
“We’ve wanted to get out of this life for a long time,” said Mrs. Peterson. Aunt Ellen. “But we just couldn’t see our way financially.”
“But now we’ve got our land,” said my mother in jubilation, as if her candidate had just won the presidency and inflation would end in sixty minutes. “And we’ll be selling the microwave ovens, the televisions, the blenders, the stereo sets. We,” she said, and she actually took Aunt Ellen’s hand across the table and clasped it tightly, “we are going to be free.”
“Free from what?” I said.
“The demands and burdens of city life,” said Uncle Bob.
“I told you so,” said Lucas.
I hate people who say I told you so. Especially in Lucas’ stupid newborn foghorn. “I know a good shrink you could go to,” I said to my father. “Psychiatrists are all the rage now. Maybe that’s what you need.”
He gave me a funny smile, “That’s what we’d need if we stayed, Marnie. But we’re getting out now. And most of all for your sake.”
For my sake?
“Look at Lucas, swept up by the need to score high on college boards, the need to be a National Merit finalist, the need to achieve ninety-five averages in math, the need to win every debate, the need to write term papers that would be acceptable in college. His whole life is a book and a desk. And you, Marnie! Unable to survive without your television comedies. Impossible to live with unless you get your daily overdose of Pepsi or Coke. You can’t function without shallow friends babbling on the telephone. Can’t appear in school unless you dress in exactly what everyone else has. We have to get you kids away, teach you something of the real, beautiful world, before you’re completely corrupted.”
If growing up is knowing when not to hit your head on a brick wall, I grew up quite a bit in that moment. I knew there was no use defending my activities, my friends, or my school. And it was definitely not the time to mention my pressing need for rhinestone-studded disco slippers.
I’ve got to make concessions, I thought desperately. Fast, because they aren’t kidding. This is no whim. Not a night course in stained glass ornaments. They mean this.
“I won’t watch TV anymore,” I said quickly. “It’s a good idea for you to sell the television. I should read more. And TV isn’t that important. I can understand—”
“Marnie,” said my mother, “it’s deeper than that.”
I knew how the sailors felt when Columbus told them, Oh, by the way, we’re planning to sail off the edge. Trust me. The world is round.
Trust them. Farming is fun. You, too, can own a mule.
“I still don’t see how you plan to get any money,” said Lucas. “I mean, even if everything grows and we raise our own food and heat with our own wood, we’ll still need money. We’ll have to buy shoes, and pay taxes on the land, and pay for the telephone and the electricity and the diesel fuel for the tractor.”
“One cash crop should cover the few needs we’ll have, Lucas. As for the telephone and the electricity, we aren’t going to have either one. We have bought a small Gravely tractor and a chain saw, but that’s about all that will need fuel.”
“A chain saw?” I said. “What is that? A medieval instrument of torture? You’ll chain us to a saw to make us cut wood?”
They howled with laughter. Good old Marnie, always in there with a one-liner. But nobody explained what a chain saw was.
For some time the adults spoke reverently about “the land.” Obviously country land was superior to city land, which lay under cement sidewalks and didn’t count. Uncle Bob told us how he had lived a life of quiet desperation, and finally, like Thoreau, had decided to live for truth and beauty.
“But I have an important debate coming up,” said Lucas. “And next year is my senior year. I have plans.”
“You’ll go to school in the country, Lucas. Probably a better system there anyway. But school doesn’t really matter. Your real education will be on the land. Coming to grasp nature’s plans and your place in them.”
Aunt Ellen said, “I’ve had conferences with your principal. Since you’ll be missing the last six weeks of school, you’ll be taking final exams week after next and because both of you have good grades, I expect there will be no problem getting credit for the whole year. Now, we won’t enroll you in school once we move, because we’ll need you working with us to get the farm started up. Next September you’ll start locally. But don’t worry about it. School isn’t a priority.”
“It is for me,” said Lucas.
Uncle Bob put an arm around his son. “This will be good for you, Lucas. I know you think you’ll miss something. But take my word for it. As a brilliant writer once said, ‘The reason they’re called lessons is, they lessen from day to day.’”
I thought about that. “What brilliant writer?” I said suspiciously.
“Lewis Carroll. In Alice in Wonderland.”
“That seems suitable,” I said. If anything had gone mixed-up, inside-out, and topsy-turvy, it was our lives, right this minute.
“Just think,” said my mother dreamily. “Walking on thick green grass. Over our own meadows, along pine-needle paths in deep woods.”
“There’s more to farming than poetry,” said Lucas. “There’s manure, drought, crop failure, poor soil, insect attacks or blight, and—”
“And we’ll learn how to handle that sort of thing together,” said his father.
“What am I supposed to tell people at school?” I demanded. I could just see myself going up to Joel and Susannah and Eve and Kay and all Joel’s senior teammates, and telling them I was off to the southern mountains with Lucas Peterson, a mule, and lots of good honest dirt.
“Tell them you’re going to be free,” said my mother.
Lucas began to laugh. Obviously the thought of Marnie MacDonald telling Joel Fiori’s crowd that she was going to be free at last made his evening much better.
“Free,” I said. “If I were free I’d make a different choice.” And then I thought of Susannah. “Mother, I could stay with Susannah. Her parents wouldn’t mind.”
“Marnie, it is one thing to spend a weekend now and then with a friend. I assure you that her parents would not take on another child for several years. You are only fifteen. Anyway, the whole point of this is to get you away from here as well as us.”
“Isn’t it surprising?” said Aunt Ellen. “They’re so young. I would have thought the young could understand change better. Embrace change just for the sake of change.”
“The young,” said Uncle Bob, “often cling to familiarity.”
“The young,” said Aunt Ellen, “often—”
“Will you stop calling us the young?” said Lucas. “We are not a litter of something.”
“I want to know why you didn’t tell me?” I said. “Fifteen is old enough to be told about volcanic eruptions in one’s family. Fifteen is even old enough to be consulted.”
“We tried, Marnie. You wouldn’t listen. You kept rushing around, refusing to take the time to hear what we had to say. Frantically going from one thing to another in your empty life.”
“Empty! My life is crammed. And I have so much more to do here. I don’t want to leave school, I don’t want to do this!”
“We know what is best, Marnie. Moving to the country will be a blessing for you.”
“A blessing! What am I supposed to do? Rejoice in the raising of lima beans? Thrill to the odor of manure on my shoe? Sing with joy at the prospect of pruning a tree?”
I had hurt them. Deflated them like balloons. They sagged, the exhilaration gone. They looked older, and less ready to go on a vacation.
I felt like a monster. I found myself wanting to apologize. But they were the rotten ones! But I had never, not purposely at least, been unpleasant to my parents. The hurt look on my mother’s face whipped me.
“Well, I,” said Lucas, “I, personally, am not going.”
“Nonsense,” said his father.
And Aunt Ellen produced a notebook and they began to compose the newspaper ad for the yard sale at which we would sell everything we owned.