4
Episode Four. Thursday.
One Day Before the Wedding.
A little before five a.m. the eastern sky goes pale rose and the dawn chorus is overlaid by a heraldic blast. The startled birds hush, and from near and far—within the house, in every increasingly populated room from office to attic, out in the dew-sparkling trio of tents pitched by the barn, in every nest and burrow and warren on the property, even over at McElroy’s farm, a field and a half away—the stirring reveille can be heard.
Carrie’s sons, Otis and Hugh, never before having awoken in Rundle Junction, hear it and suppose it is a daily occurrence in this village. Instantly they are jealous.
Banjo’s baby, Harriett, who has been awake for some time and regarding, from the crook of her father’s arm, the configurations the sunrise choreographs along the ceiling of their tent, hears it, and her mouth goes into vigorous sucking motion.
Tom, who has only just gone to bed, hears it and pulls his pillow over his head.
Lloyd, having at last triumphed over his old nemesis insomnia and drifted into sleep, hears it in a manner so muffled by the whir of the box fan in the window and the derelict standing fan oscillating with its inebriate’s lurch, that it becomes part of his dream.
His daughter, Ellerby, on the trundle bed one floor below, hears it and pokes the unresponsive leg of Mantha.
Mantha, who could sleep through a bomb going off, neither hears it nor feels her cousin’s prodding finger.
Carrie, staying in the one attic room that is “finished”—it boasts a passable bed, a modicum of actual bedroom furniture, curtains, a couple of faded Currier & Ives prints, and, crucially, a window air-conditioning unit—always sleeps with foam earplugs. Between those and the AC no outside noise stands a chance.
Clem and Chana and Hannah hear it, the first two lifting their heads from their pillows. “What the—?” says Clem, and “What is that?” echoes Chana, while the third doesn’t bother opening an eye. She merely groans. And diagnoses (accurately): “Fucking Dave-Dave.”
Bennie and Walter and Pim, crowded together in the big cherrywood bed, hear it and open their eyes. Walter, with the grumpy, confounded expression he always wears for the first several minutes upon waking, regardless of time or circumstance, scowls at Bennie. Bennie, as usual instantly lucid, sees his scowl and raises him bafflement. Pim is first to recognize the tune. He declares rapturously, “Superman!” His parents, realizing he’s right, what they’re hearing is in fact the theme from the John Williams film score being played on a French horn, exchange a second glance and, very much in spite of themselves, begin to crack up. Their attempts to stifle their laughter only increase their hilarity. Pim’s, too: within moments all three are huddled snugly on their stomachs, mouths pressed into the bedclothes, positively heaving with mirth.
The perpetrator himself stands loin-deep in the pasture between the barn and McElroy’s property, saluting dawn with his lungs. Breath, flowing through the golden coils of his instrument, warms the metal from the inside. The just-risen sun warms it from without. Makes a halo of his macaroni curls. Bejewels the high wet grass that soaks him to the thighs. And begins to burn off the milk-white mist that hangs close above the fields.
Richard the dog, having followed Dave-Dave out of the tent, hears it and, although he has never been anywhere near a foxhunt, that part of him that is hound is galvanized deep in the blood. As if by some arcane canine circuitry he is able to recognize, in the opening fanfare of Gs and Cs, a bugle call. He halts, lifts both his snout and one delicately poised paw, and stands motionless save for the quivering, leathery moistness of his nose.
Aunt Glad, drifting in and out, hears it and is unsurprised.
He comes for me, she thinks. Little boy blue, close at last.
Her heart skips a beat.
In his nakedness, in his glory, with his horn he comes.
IN THE SILENCE that follows the final note Clem, lying awake in the tent, is flooded with butterflies. Today is Thursday. The day her beloved—from whom she has been separated for seven whole weeks—arrives. The flutters as visceral as if an actual bevy of winged creatures is churning inside her.
Thinking these words—butterfly, churning—makes her think suddenly of the old butter churn. She hasn’t thought of that thing in years! More than half her life has elapsed since they dug it out of the barn, responding to a call for props for her third-grade play, a production about which she remembers virtually nothing except her costume—a mob cap and apron she had felt utterly, numinously transformed by—and her single line: A woman’s work is never done! which she’d delivered with heartfelt conviction and which had gotten, unexpectedly and possibly offensively, a huge laugh. Where is it now, she wonders—a real old-fashioned butter churn she was lucky to have in the family, lucky since how many families stayed put (enjoyed the luxury of being able to choose to stay put, as Diggs has taught her to see it) long enough, and in possession of enough storage space, to house obsolete objects of cumbersome size?
Reabsorbed, no doubt, into the great glacier of detritus that has been consigned to the barn over the decades, from wrought-iron headboards to broken snowshoes to sleds with rusty runners; from steamer trunks stuffed with yellowed lace to a yellow Bakelite console radio the size of a steamer trunk; from a kerosene lamp and a set of currycombs to a Lava lamp and a set of electric hair rollers. Not to mention a wooden yoke, a galvanized metal icebox, a hand-crank ice cream maker, and last but not least—dismembered, its parts scattered about the heap—the venerable, retired Glendale stove. You could fairly taste the air, storied with molecules of ancient hay and manure; you could feel on your skin the way it held the imprints of past lives, lives of people responsible in some direct way for her own existence. How minor she always felt within the space of the barn, conscious that her own footprint, tiny and recent, was appended to so long and dense a history. It was oddly sweet, this reminder of her own insignificance.
Of course such a reminder is itself a luxury. For how many people are denied access to their family history, every route to their past rendered untraceable, the connections all rubbed out by empire and colonialism? I don’t think we go very far back on my dad’s side of the family, Clem had ventured once. I think most of them stayed behind in Romania. Or Russia, whatever. And got wiped out in the Holocaust. She was conscious of tendering the statement as not quite an apologia, but a kind of credential, an attempt to say, See? Our lineage has gaps, too—but even as she spoke she realized it was a false equivalency. To flee—even in the face of tyranny, even in the face of genocide—is one thing. To be brought in captivity is another.
All the more reason you should get what a privilege it is, then, Diggs had replied, sounding neither reproachful nor impressed. Her own family tree remained largely obscure, its roots traceable no farther back than a great-grandmother who, after emancipation, was supposed to have farmed rice and indigo in South Carolina. Even her family name, Diggins, was of course a blind alley, a crooked arrow pointing toward a history of slaveholders rather than shedding light on those who’d been abducted, sold, and stripped of their own original names. But Diggs didn’t begrudge Clem. On the contrary; she encouraged Clem to value what she had, to be curious about it, to research and study it. You’re lucky, you know? To have even half your heritage so well-preserved. As if her WASP ancestry were packed like so many peach slices in their own sweet syrup in a Mason jar.
The air in the tent is redolent of lady-sleep, their feminine attar of breath and oil and hair and sweat, their hodgepodge lotions and powders and sprays, their dew-damp backpacks and wadded-up balls of yesterday’s clothes. Suddenly she is bursting with love for her friends, the Ch/Hannahs, in all their disheveled devotion, their absurdly beautiful willingness to play with her, to play. She marvels. How good they are, how innocent in their faith, how unfaltering in their allegiance. For not even they know yet all that she has planned, how she has scripted this, how she’s approached this thing as an extension of her senior thesis, a kind of paratheater in which the border between art and life is dissolved.
Not even Diggs knows all the details, though she has given her blessing (while rolling her eyes) to being surprised. “Look, you know what? My parents already think it’s subversive. You being a woman and all.”
“And white.”
“Wait—you’re white?”
“I know, I was going to wait until our wedding night, but . . .”
“Damn.” Diggs had gotten all serious, pretended to count on her fingers: “Woman. White. Theater major.”
And Clem laughed a protesting laugh and whacked her on the shoulder.
But if their wedding is to be meta, or para, or pseudo, a kind of ersatz commentary on the institution of marriage, the love between them is all real. It pours. As uncontainable, as nectarous as the light filtering through the tent. That’s pure Diggs, the scrambling-up of eros and fruit. Clementina, she’s been known to intone, her face tipping up slyly from between Clem’s thighs, her voice sweet and hoarse. Clementina, Clementina, she has rasped, you taste like you’re called, only to disappear downward again, leaving Clem’s field of vision to fill with the fan-shaped plaster swirls of her dorm room ceiling. This had been Diggs’s first visit back to campus after graduating. On a long weekend last fall, well before they had spoken of marriage. Before they’d begun using the word relationship even. This thing, they’d called it then. When they were feeling brave: This thing between us. When that seemed too bold: This “thing” between us, whatever.
Clem had felt a kick of surprise when Diggs confirmed, after months of maintaining a supremely casual air, that she was planning to come up from law school to spend the long weekend. Not only that, she’d already purchased the train ticket.
“Really?”
“We planned this, duh?”
“Yeah no, I know. I just didn’t—”
“Is it a problem? Have you other arrangements?”
Even over the phone it was easy to tell Diggs was hurt. The giveaway being her diction. When she was upset it became impeccable, clipped. Almost British.
“No!” said Clem. “No other arrangements have I. It’s just that . . . I honestly wasn’t sure . . .” She touched her throat, which had gone dry. “I didn’t want to . . . assume. When you said you would come. To assume you meant it.”
“Are you demented?”
Clem had laughed.
“Why”—and how she loved this about Diggs, her way of asking a question point-blank, and now there was nothing clipped in her voice; it had pivoted from UK to DC—“why would you even want to be friends with a person who says shit she doesn’t mean?”
So lo and behold: she had meant it, and she did come, and that weekend something had cracked open between them, some chary proscription on speaking of themselves as a couple with a future. They’d spent absurdly close to the entire seventy-two hours holed up together in Clem’s dorm room under the eaves, during which time they both began to think—and not simply think but think out loud—that whatever said “thing” between them was, it had legs.
In any case it survived Diggs’s graduation, a summer spent largely apart, and this entire past year of their inhabiting not just different geographies but different paradigmatic spheres, Diggs acclimating herself to the culture of legal studies in their nation’s capital while Clem remained ensconced in a world of undergrads and play.
That’s what Diggs maintained.
“How superior we’ve become,” sniffed Clem.
It had been early November. After their glorious three-day weekend together it had become untenable to go more than a couple of weeks without seeing each other, and Diggs had taken the train north for the weekend again.
“It’s true,” said Diggs, sounding, as she always did first thing in the morning, like a rusty cat. “You’re all about play. You live mostly in your imagination.” (Clem thought of Mantha’s classification system; didn’t she have one category called Make-Believe Life?) “Case in point,” continued Diggs, “this room: imaginary.”
Clem, delighted at the preposterousness of the assertion, laughed.
They’d been in bed. It was early, overcast. The radiator pinged and clanged. “What’s imaginary about it?”
“It’s fairyland in here,” Diggs insisted. “It’s the gingerbread cottage. You’re Rapunzel in her tower.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors, honeygirl. You’re mixing your Grimms.”
“Look. Case in point.” Diggs jabbed a finger at the ceiling. “That shit’s like Betty Crocker.”
“Huh?”
“The ceiling.”
“Er . . . I repeat: huh?”
“You know.” Diggs gave an impatient click of her tongue. “Like the frosting on those old TV commercials. For cake mix. Like with the housewife standing there with the perfect lipstick?”
“Oh. And like a plaid dress with a belt?”
“And her hair all spray painted.”
“Spray painted—like Banksy? Might you perhaps mean ‘hair sprayed’?”
“Whatever. Okay, it’s not that funny.” (Clem was laughing so hard now she managed to fall half out of the bed. Diggs hauled her back.) “I’m saying. White people hair products are in her hair, okay? And she’s standing there with her perfect cake.”
From then on Clem could not look at her swirly-plastered dorm room ceiling without thinking of buttercream frosting. And fairy tales and mischief.
The wedding is mischief. Of a sort. Not in the sense of malice or harm, but of disruption. Playful disruption. Serious playful disruption. A kind of tricksterism, a turning inside out.
In school she’d been taught the etymology of theater: from the Greek theasthai, “to behold,” and thence to theatron, “a seeing place.” Stella Adler said people come to theater to see the truth about life. In her thesis Clem took up Grotowski’s claim that the theater is a place of provocation, that it challenges by violating accepted stereotypes, then posited her own theory that this must necessarily be a two-step process. First mimesis, then disruption. Going on the idea that you need to give the audience familiar ground to stand on before whisking the rug out from under them.
It was in talks with Leopardi, her thesis adviser—a wizened man barely taller than five feet, with breath that reeked always of Fisherman’s Friend cough drops—that she hatched the idea of building a practical, empirical element into the project. Together they dismissed the idea of anything so banal as an invited presentation or even an act of spontaneous improv or street theater that might take place somewhere on campus. They had lengthy discussions in which they imagined how she might co-opt a public ritual or planned community event as the basis for a performance, and toyed with the idea of Clem’s disrupting her own commencement exercises as a form of outlaw art, but in the end discarded this as (a) unduly risky (“I have had tenure for more years than your feet have graced the earth, cucciola,” Leopardi pointed out, exhaling a dank licorice gust in her direction, “but you—you will not yet have your two-hundred-thousand-dollar-sheepskin testimonium safely in hand”) and (b) parasitic.
“If I’m really serious about this,” Clem had decided, “I think I have to take ownership of creating the ritual I’m planning to disrupt.”
“Ah but this,” Leopardi had cried, coughing and wheezing, then seizing an ethereal simulacrum of Clem’s face in two hands and planting upon it an audibly moist kiss (after having twice been brought up on harassment complaints before the school’s Title IX Hearing Panel, he had come to appreciate more fully the merits of pantomime), “this integrity, this assiduity, this dedicazione, this is why I love—is why you are among the top five or ten students I have known in the entirety of my career!”
And so, with Leopardi’s blessing and counsel, she had begun to plan the experiential component of her thesis project: the creation of a public ritual she would then crack open. Like a sacrificial jug.
“HI HANNAH,” says Tom as the former, attired in a gargantuan black T-shirt, yesterday’s eye makeup having transitioned overnight into a footballer’s eye black, ascends the stairs, cracked leather dopp kit in hand. Then, gutturally: “Chai Chana,” as a similarly disheveled Chana appears.
“Yuk yuk.”
“I know.” Tom lowers his lashes. “I’m a funny guy.” Clad only in worn-to-gossamer pajama bottoms, he slouches against the wall opposite the bathroom, from behind whose door the sound of the shower can be heard (along with little bursts of Ellerby belting out, of all things, “I am sixteen going on seventeen”). He feels no shyness as a half-naked sixteen-year-old boy in the presence of two nubile young women. He has been liking his body quite a lot lately, in a marveling sort of way. Finds himself spending time alone before his full-length mirror studying it, learning it, appreciating the daily novelty of inhabiting it, and he yearns to have others appreciate it as well—almost without vanity, almost unrelated to personal reward, the way if you saw something beautiful, a killer play by Messi, for example, or a perfect bacon cheeseburger with curly fries on the side, you’d want others to witness it, too. Simply because it exists, and is excellent, and ought to be remarked. So he is not embarrassed when he feels both Ch/Hannahs’ gazes traveling over his torso. But then, idly, he chances to notice that Hannah’s V-neck is low and her cleavage on view—what a word, cleavage! what a concept!—and this, his susceptibility to becoming transfixed by the body of another, does rattle him, and causes him to announce officiously, “You’re third and fourth in line, by the way.”
“Why? Who’s before you?”
“After me,” he corrects, only to be drowned out by a ringing assertion from behind the closed door of Mantha’s room: “Me!”
“No way,” says Hannah. “No back cuts.”
“It’s not back cuts!” The disembodied voice sallies forth even more resoundingly. “I was already there before you! He’s just holding my place so I can get some rest!”
“And how’s that working out for you?” Hannah mutters.
“Fourth?” squeaks Chana. “I’ll never make it!”
“Dude. What do you have, like a permanent UTI?”
“No joke, you guys, I totally have to pee!” And relinquishing her claim on position number four she scurries downstairs to try her luck with the powder room.
Hannah, half serious, to Tom: “Think she’s bribable, your sister?”
“Eminently.”
“What would she go for?”
“Oh, straight-up cash.”
Hannah’s laugh: a little aphrodisiac. She slides down the wall to wait on the floor. Immediately Tom perceives the complication therein and tries to calculate his next move according to the relative payoff: the naughty thrill of an enhanced view down her shirt if he remains standing versus the more subdued reward of self-commendation for chivalry if he lowers himself beside her. “So,” she addresses him conversationally (he sits so fast his knee cracks), “are you for real an outlaw?”
“Wha—?”
“Are you a graffiti artist? A vandal? A neo-Nazi?”
“Oh that. Yeah. All of the above.”
“Figured.”
“Yeah?”
“Had you pegged. The moment I saw you. A young Himmler, I says to myself.”
Now Tom laughs. “And you?”
“And me what?”
“What are your deep dark secrets? Anything you want to confess?”
“Well . . .” She turns to him with her very large, dark velvet eyes, framed by caked, flaked mascara and wanton smudges of kohl. Up close like this, in such a humbly intimate setting, pre–morning ablutions, he takes in, too, her seriously bitable lips (an attribute he has not previously noticed), her subtle and somehow childlike overbite, and the great unbroken tundra of skin sloping precipitously from her throat to midway down her bosom. “. . . between you and me . . .” she continues, lowering her voice to a whisper and bringing her mouth to within four millimeters of his ear, “I’m in love with the bride.”
WALTER AND LLOYD exit the barn like a couple of strange beasts, encumbered by clusters of folding chairs swaying like extra appendages under each of their four arms. Behind them the door squawks on broken hinges. Sweaty already, they tramp past the little encampment, each of the three tents flying a festive little homemade flag. Strewn on the grass in every direction are assorted items—towels, jeans, onesies, underpants, sneakers, flip-flops, a baby bottle, a bicycle pump, earbuds, a stuffed rabbit—either laid out to air or simply abandoned in the midmorning sun.
“Let’s just leave them here for now,” says Walter when he and Lloyd reach the black walnut, against whose trunk they lean the chairs. “I don’t know how Clem wants them set up.”
Lloyd, hands supporting his lumbar region, arches his back and peers up into the branches, festooned with strings of LED lights and paper lanterns. A long time ago he used to write poetry up there, sequestered high above the earth, hidden from view except for his dangling legs. He’d sharpen his pencils with a pocketknife, let the shavings drop to the ground. He’d been a teenager then, both sisters off at college, both parents newly in their graves. Aunt Glad had given up her own apartment in town and moved back into her childhood home, in order to provide her nephew with an adult presence and a rotation of feebly seasoned but well-balanced meals during his last year of high school. He never told anyone about his poems—is that true? He cannot think of anyone he ever mentioned them to. He’d forgotten them himself until this morning. He used to stash everything—poems, pencils, pocketknife—in the tree, in a hollow made by rot. He wonders if any of it remains. Not the poems, surely, but possibly the pencils and quite likely the knife. He doubts he could climb that high anymore.
Ellerby could. She’d scamper up in about half a minute if he told her the tree might harbor artifacts of his youth. He lets a reel play in his mind, footage of an imaginary scene in which she ascends and finds all the treasures intact, the poems as well as the knife. The latter had been a gift from a maternal relative (some kind of elderly second cousin who’d kept impressing upon him the fact that it was an heirloom, understand? an Erlend family heirloom), given to him after his mother had died. At the funeral, in fact. Both of them, bestower and recipient, octogenarian and teenager, ill at ease in their jackets and ties among the white bouquets. Both of them dry-eyed, both more than a bit sloshed. “Every boy should have his own knife,” the old man had said. Or some such malarkey. “Now you’ve got an Erlend knife there, son. I know you’ll take good care of it.”
All this connected to the very reason he won’t actually tell Ellerby. About any of it: the funeral, the knife, the poems in the tree. Doesn’t want her saddled with it. The weight of legacy. The sad bullshit weight of legacy.
“You okay?” asks Walter.
“What?”
“Hurt your back?”
“No, no, I’m good.” He regards Walter: kind aspect, sloe eyes, large, snowy-maned head. He imagines telling Walter about the lost poems—Walter who lives by jacket and tie, who bundles off without fail every morning to catch the 6:54, briefcase in hand, who attends village meetings and kids’ soccer games, pays his taxes on time and votes in local as well as national elections; Walter who twenty years ago quietly and manfully assumed the mantle Lloyd cast off: that of patriarch, preserver of the homestead, upstanding upholder of the Erlend family foothold in Rundle Junction. Rubs a hand across his mouth. “Let’s keep going,” Lloyd says.
They head back toward the barn, unaware they’re being stalked.
Slinking through the high grasses of the pampas, the hunter-gatherers track the two water buffalo. The bigger members of the hunting party carry ranged weapons (a bow and arrow for the one they call Big Face and a spear for Big Eyes) but the littlest is armed only with a melee weapon—a dagger stuck in the waistband of his pants—and of course his astonishing skill and courage. Capable of walking without making a sound, of spotting prey miles off, of charging an enemy three times his size—even, the people say, of moving between raindrops without getting wet: he is their leader.
The pair of buffalo near. Almost pitiable in their ignorance of the lurking predators, they move without haste, grunting to each other. Now they draw parallel to the spot where the trackers hide. The leader holds out his arm, signaling to the men behind him to prepare for attack. He puts up a finger: one; then another: two; then his thumb: now! and with terrible shrieks they catapult from the cover of the pampas grass and set upon their luckless targets.
Big Face and Big Eyes attack the skinnier one, each grabbing a leg, while their leader takes it upon himself to go alone after the larger prize. In a single move he launches himself upon the back of the great white-maned brute and whips out his dagger.
“Whoa!” bellow the buffalo. “Whoooaaaa! We’re under attack!” The lean one staggers and lurches but shows surprising stamina, bucking forward and back, then sideways, then the other way sideways, giving the hunters the ride of their lives. They make a sound that to the untrained ear might seem as laughter, but which a true hunter will recognize as a way of pacifying one’s prey. The bigger beast, though less wild, proves harder to subdue. He halts, plucks his assailant handily from his back, and sets him on the ground. Squatting, he says, “What you got there, Pim?”
“My dagger!”
“But what is it? Let me see. That looks a little sharp for you, bud.”
“It’s mine.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“It’s mine! I porridged it.”
“From where?”
He’ll never tell. He can’t help his eyes flicking toward the orange tent.
“It’s a nail file, honey. Must be one of the girls’. Go put it back where you found it.”
Pim sets off in a huff. A minor one, as huffs go. After all, he still has the pink poison tablets and the circus-colored jewel.
STILL IN HER NIGHTGOWN, shod in a pair of old rubber boots she found in the hall, Clem has left the property. She’s rambling through McElroy’s field, having decided it’s more scenic than their own field, the wildflowers more copious and various. Chicory and loosestrife, daylilies and crown vetch, she names them aloud as she brushes her hands across their tops. She learned what they were called long ago from Aunt Glad, who used to come stay with her when she was little and her parents went away. They’d go on excursions through the fields, back along the skunky-smelling swamp, into the small woods between McElroy’s and Garvey’s farm, to visit a dried-up basin Glad said was once a swimming hole. I used to disappear here for hours at a time. Sometimes with my sister but more often alone, her great-grandaunt told her. With no one but the squirrels and birds to testify to my existence.
When she was a child the thought never crossed her mind, but now Clem wonders just how lonely Glad’s life has been. And if it has been a lonely life, for what reason? Being a gay woman in a time and place when the cost of expression would have been too great? Bearing scars too disfiguring for a would-be lover to see beyond? Or does she bear scars of another, invisible kind? Could the trauma she experienced at age seven have caused adhesions in her soul? What made her want to disappear for hours at a time?
Clem, at once genuinely moved by these musings and rather pleased by being thus moved, plucks a black-eyed Susan and slides its stem behind her ear. She vows never to lose a sense of gratitude. How fortunate she is to be able to marry her beloved! How fortunate even to have met.
It was December of Clem’s junior year. Diggs had been a senior immersed in law school applications and LSAT prep; Clem had been immersed, it must be said, in very little having to do with academics. At that point in her college career she was lavishing the bulk of her time and attention on participating in the extracurricular “happenings” staged by a renegade group of theater majors calling themselves This Is Not A Theater Collective.
It was thanks to one of their paratheatrical events, in fact, that Clem and Diggs came together. This particular event featured a dozen members of the collective, all costumed in vaguely postapocalyptic garb (torn and tattered clothing, bare feet, gas masks on some, paper surgical masks on others). These actors infiltrated the main reading room of the library at precisely midnight and, from strokes one through twelve on the campus campanile, staggered among the studious, some threading their way through the stacks, others slithering down from the balcony or creeping on all fours across the floor. As the hour finished chiming, they assembled in the center of the room, at which point an accomplice pressed a button on an MP3 player and James Brown’s “Doing It to Death” flooded the marble-walled, green-carpeted, vault-ceilinged space. At this point the zombielike figures began to writhe and gyrate right out of their masks and rags, stripping down to leotards and tights, in which they leaped upon tables with unbridled verve and proceeded, through the example of their own joyful intemperance, to unshackle their fellow students from the woes of completion week by whipping them into a festively frenzied dance party.
Sort of.
That, at any rate, had been the plan when the members of This Is Not A Theater Collective had met the night before to come up with a concept. Their goal for this, as for all their happenings, clearly stated in the collective’s manifesto (This Is Not A Manifesto) was to disrupt the “airless status quo” and deliver “the oxygen of unsought, unexpected, unorchestrated joy.” The “unorchestrated” part invariably led to tension around planning their happenings, with members forever in dispute about how much planning would constitute a violation of the mandate versus how little would obviate the possibility of successfully disseminating joy.
For whatever reason, on the December night when she made her inaugural performance with This Is Not A Theater Collective, the joy part was not really forthcoming. Not for want of trying—Clem had put her all into the act, from her slinking entrance into the main reading room to the ecstatic shedding of her preliminary costume to her go-go-girl shimmying from the perch of a study carrel. Eyes shut, hips grinding, she had been thinking, Man, this is college! Man, this is life! when a voice undercut James Brown’s promise to take them all highhhhhhhh-er.
“You people really need to leave.” The voice was authoritative without being strident. “Seriously. This. Is. Fucked. Up.”
Clem opened her eyes and looked around to gauge how other members of the noncollective were reacting. Most were still dancing, either truly oblivious or pretending (so well-trained had they been by their acting professors: Don’t break concentration! Don’t break the fourth wall!) not to notice.
“Hel-lo!”
Now Clem located the speaker, sitting at one of the long tables not far from her. It was the woman people called Diggs, someone she knew by sight. And, vaguely, by reputation: smart, studious, chip on her shoulder.
Clem stood frozen on her carrel in her pink leotard, looking down at the unsmiling face of Diggs. Diggs: so commanding she wasn’t even standing. She sat behind a stack of books, elegant in a black turtleneck and horn-rimmed glasses, her hair worn natural and very short. And Diggs, having found at least one mischief-maker making direct eye contact with her, seemed to address the next thing she said specifically to Clem. Who wanted to die.
“You need,” Diggs said, “to turn that shit off, get over your privilege, and let serious people study.”
Someone disconnected the music.
What titters broke out among other students were quickly squashed. So it was to the more damning accompaniment of concerted silence, broken only by the ruffling of pages and the sound of fingers tapping on laptops, that Clem and the other members of the noncollective slunk off their perches and shamefacedly collected the shed pieces of their costumes.
It was the way Diggs had said “Thank you” then—dignified, equable, with nary a gloat or a sneer—that roused something in Clem stronger than shame. Curiosity. And although Diggs had returned to her note taking, dropping her gaze back to her own papers and books, ignoring, but as if from courtesy rather than haughtiness, the inglorious exit of the dancers, Clem with beating heart went out of her way to stop by her table, to stand there until Diggs looked up and to whisper, burning-cheeked, “I’m sorry.” Diggs merely nodded. No trace of a smile.
But after that Clem found herself running into Diggs everywhere: in front of her on line at the bookstore, behind her when she went to refill her coffee in the cafeteria, on side-by-side ellipticals at the gym, waiting for the free shuttle into town, even doing laundry in the basement of her dorm (never mind that Diggs lived off campus). They went through periods of tentative friendship, then tentative flirtation, until eventually one freezing night on the library roof they engaged in what Diggs with adorably prudish understatement referred to as “smooching.” There followed an agonizing fortnight absent any acknowledgment of their rooftop rendezvous, during which Clem made herself sick scrutinizing every speck of punctuation within their virtual communiqués, mulling over the multiple possible meanings of every word uttered, every breath held, every eyebrow arched, every micrometer of distance added or subtracted between them in their face-to-face conversations. Then their contact stopped. A week went by without her running into Diggs once. Then another week. Clem lost four pounds. Also all her notes for a research paper on Susan Sontag’s ideological and romantic influence on the avant-garde Cuban playwright María Irene Fornés. Also her bike lock and then (not surprisingly) her bike.
“This has got to stop,” said Hannah. They were squirreled in the dorm lounge under an old plaid comforter somebody had abandoned there, watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents and eating New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Actually Clem had not touched hers. “How?” In a hoarse whisper she addressed the bowl of melting Ben & Jerry’s in her lap.
“Okay, please write this down. You need to call her up and (a) Tell Her How You Feel, and (b) Tell Her You Need to Know How She Feels.”
“Okay,” said Clem. Being lovelorn made her compliant. “When? How?”
“Oh my God,” said Hannah. “Give me your phone.” She took it, dialed it, handed it back. “Now give me your bowl.”
And while Hannah slurped up the last of the chocolate by-now soup, Clem had lain bare her heart and Diggs had listened with vested interest, then pulled back the curtain on her own.
And now, tomorrow, a year and a half after first meeting, they will pull back the curtain together, the pair of them; they’ll stand and plight their troth before family and friends, in a ritual marrying reality with theatricality. For isn’t it always both? thinks Clem, wandering through McElroy’s field. As much with the private scenarios we all act out inside our own heads as with grand works displayed for the public, theater is in the business of both reflecting and affecting reality. This was what she had concluded in her senior thesis: that whether theater aims (like the famous community pageant of 1927) to reinforce things as they are, or whether it aims (like Clem’s own experimental theater piece, about to have its one and only staged performance tomorrow) to question and trouble our notion of reality, it is always a tool for motion.
Which she feels in herself: a sudden, urgent surge of motion. Tomorrow isn’t just her wedding day, it’s also her debut—not in the sense of an ingénue, but as a thinker, a contributor. She thinks of Diggs saying, I arrived the day I came out my momma. At last Clem has a sense of her own readiness to arrive. At the mercy now of a kind of ferocious excitement, she drops the flowers she has been gathering and breaks into a run. The midmorning sun seems to rear back before her, gilding the high grass as she parts it with her strides. Grasshoppers spark up in her path. She is smiling, broadly, with a kind of dumb happiness. For she has just seen something, or just had something revealed to her, something at once perfectly obvious and utterly profound—about the true nature of her privilege.
Bennie and Walter’s marriage had never been a picture postcard of sweetness and light; in fact they fought not infrequently, and at times quite heatedly, all throughout Clem’s life. But that, she sees now, is an essential component of what was so good about her childhood, which is simply the privilege of growing up believing that no matter what strife came between them, her parents would sort it out, survive. Not necessarily even that the marriage would survive. Just that everything, everyone, would in some large, vital fashion be okay.
This security, she wishes she could tell Diggs now—more than the family home, the land, the property, the barn stuffed to the gills with material treasure or debris—this is the marker of the ultimate privileged childhood. The abiding faith that everything remains in motion.
She stops, panting, halfway back to the house. For she has just seen something else: a man, a stranger, wandering about their yard. He peers into the branches of the black walnut tree, circles the ladder lying in the grass, then starts up the unused front walk. Funny, she thinks, that on a hot June day anyone would wear such a long black coat and hat.
“BUT DO YOU THINK? I mean should we? Ask Aunt Glad?” Carrie in the kitchen is stage-whispering to Bennie, who rolls her eyes. Because why stage-whisper? Because isn’t that just so Carrie? The popeyed reverence for drama. All that energy wasted tiptoeing around, avoiding offense, all that fear of bruising one another. As if people were fruit. Please.
“If you’re curious, ask.” She taps the end of her pencil against the poor old scratched table, where she has been surveying and updating her little blue to-do lists. “Why make a big thing of it?”
It being the matter of the name Benjamin Erlend on the village memorial plaque.
“Because if it’s her brother and we never knew, there must be a reason. That no one ever told us. Or talked about it. Man. Two years old. It’s so sad.”
“Look.” Bennie shoves the pencil into her hair and pours more coffee into both their mugs. “She’s ninety-four. If you want to ask, make it snappy.”
“Don’t you want to know?”
Bennie helps herself to a saltine from a nearly exhausted packet (this morning she’s needed to insert one in her mouth every five minutes to keep the nausea at bay) and shrugs.
“But he’s your namesake!”
“We don’t know that.”
“Bennie!”
“What?”
“I don’t get how you can be so blasé.”
Privately, Bennie shares some of Carrie’s surprise: it is sort of strange that she doesn’t care. Except it isn’t really that she doesn’t care. It’s that she doesn’t want to care. She finds that she’s disturbed by what’s implied: the idea that being related to one of the eighteen victims should make them feel something extra about that particular death. The idea offends her very sense of humanity. She rejects it.
All she says is: “Look, Car. I assure you the word blasé does not capture what I am feeling at this moment. All right? I have a houseful of people, a yard full of tents, cops showing up on my doorstep, a son who might have committed a felony, oh yeah and a wedding to host tomorrow”—she indicates the sheets of blue notepaper laid on the table, each covered with scribbles and crossings-out; truth be told she enjoys finding the rhythm in her litany of woes—“on a lawn that’s somehow simultaneously bald and overgrown . . .” She looks out the window. Ridiculous. The ladder is still out there lying on its side, the black walnut tree has a mess of wires dangling from its branches, and a paltry assemblage of none-too-sturdy-looking folding chairs has been erected in haphazard fashion.
“But don’t you want to know if she had a little brother?” Carrie practically wails. “It’s your family tree!”
That’s just the problem, Bennie thinks. Again: the almost giddy sensation of being up high, the atmosphere thin and cold, sharp and shiny as silver foil. We go around caring so much about our own family tree—our own seedlings—that everyone who isn’t us begins to look like a weed.
At that moment Mantha and Pim and Ellerby come into the kitchen and Bennie catapults back to earth. For the preferential swell of her heart toward the first and the second of this trio serves notice: she is no better than anyone. She, too, loves her own blood best.
Ellerby slips around the door frame and looks at Mantha expectantly.
“We’re bored,” Mantha announces. “And hungry.”
“There’s a lethal combination,” her mother observes.
“Can we have lunch?”
“Can you have what?” In a tone suggesting Mantha’d asked for lobster thermidor.
“What little brother?” asks Pim. He is wearing a shark-tooth necklace and nothing else.
“Pants,” Bennie tells him.
“We want lunch, too!” Otis bursts into the room from the porch.
Hugh, hot on his heels: “Yeah, we’re thtarving.”
“What’s his name?” Pim repeats.
“Who?”
Mantha, shoving aside ribbons, vases, and blocks of green floral foam, clears enough counter space to perch on it and rummage through the cupboards above. “For Christ’s sake when’s all this junk going away?”
“Don’t say Christ.”
“Why not? We don’t worship Jesus.”
“The brother,” says Pim. “The little brother, Carrie said.”
“Pants,” Bennie tells him again. To Mantha: “Because some people find it offensive and I don’t want you developing the habit.”
“Fine. For Pete’s sake when’s all this junk going away?” Mantha grumbles, climbing down. “We don’t even have room to pour our cereal.” A grievance she lodges, incidentally, while pouring cereal, a bowl for her and one for Ellerby.
“That’s all you want for lunch?” asks Carrie. “You don’t want us to make you sandwi— ow!” She rubs her shin.
“If it ain’t broke . . .” Bennie whispers.
“No, we do want sandwiches,” Mantha clarifies. “This is just to keep us going until you make them. Tuna fish please. Anyway”—she turns to Pim—“they’re talking about Benjamin Erlend, from the memorial plaque.”
“Where is he?”
“Duh, he’s dead.”
“You’re dead!” Pim runs her through with an invisible sword.
“Pim.” There is steel in Bennie’s voice. “Go Upstairs and Put on Pants.”
“Why?”
“At the very least you have to put on underwear.”
“But why?” he beseeches, turning to her, the shark tooth gleaming round his neck, the escargot of a penis all bland innocence. “Why do I?” Without a trace of impudence he asks, nothing but sweet-angel-lamb curiosity. Ellerby snaps his picture.
Bennie opens her mouth. Instead of speech there issues forth a long and terrible cry, beginning low in her throat, gathering steam, and ending as a ululating screech.
Each of those present—sister, son, daughter, niece, two nephews—pauses to gauge the significance of the eruption. Each independently arrives at the same conclusion: false alarm. It’s only a performance of a woman at her wits’ end, albeit a performance separated from the real thing by a mere membrane.
Pim, acting on sudden inspiration, crosses the room to where his mother sits, lifts her hand, bends over it, plants upon it a kiss.
This proves too much for Bennie, who buries her face in her hands.
“What’s the matter?” Lloyd dashes headlong into the room. There’s something gratifying about the sight of him, ordinarily imperturbable, so visibly alarmed. He must have been in the midst of his morning ablutions, judging from the shaving cream still clinging to half his jaw and what he is wearing: nothing but a towel wrapped around his loins.
“See?” Bennie exclaims a bit hysterically. She wipes her eyes and gestures: exhibit A. “Even Lloyd manages to put something on!”
Ellerby guffaws.
Lloyd looks flabbergasted. “What’s going on?”
Nothing, nothing, he is assured . . . Pim won’t get dressed . . . Mantha said Christ . . . The kids asked for lunch and we never even gave them breakfast . . .
“Who screamed?” This time it’s Tom who pokes his head around the door frame.
“Just Mom,” says Mantha. She and Ellerby carry their cornflakes over to the breakfast nook, where they slide onto the bench beside Bennie and Carrie, sloshing milk over the sides of their bowls.
“Er . . . are we expecting someone?” Tom jerks his chin toward the window.
“God help me,” groans Bennie, “if Clem invited anybody else she didn’t tell me about.”
“How come I can’t say Christ but you get to say God?” Mantha wants to know.
“Shut up and eat your goddamn cereal.”
Mantha grins.
Bennie turns to see what Tom’s talking about. “Who on earth . . . ?” Something about her tone makes everyone gather around the nook’s many-paned window. As the stranger progresses up the obsolete front walk, they all drift left to keep him in their sights: this man who looks like he has stepped out of the past. His black coat hangs past his knees. His wiry beard hangs past his collar. He wears a black homburg with a wide brim, a white shirt with no tie, eyeglasses with round black frames. He carries a black briefcase. Two long curls depend past his ears. As he mounts the steps he disappears almost entirely from their frame of view; en masse they list farther to the left. Finally only his elbow remains visible as it comes up and he presses, presumably, the long-defunct bell. They attend to the ensuing silence.
“He doesn’t look like one of Clem’s friends,” Tom reflects.
“Maybe he knowth Uncle Walter,” suggests Hugh. “They both have briefcatheth.”
Clem creeps in softly from the porch door, unbridal in muddy nightgown and rubber boots. “There’s some guy poking around out fr—” she begins, only to realize that’s why they’re all clustered around the window.
“It’s the black hats!” Pim declares. “The black hats are here!”
“Shh.” Carrie, giggling, claps a hand over his mouth, then quickly withdraws it, Pim having licked her palm.
They all watch as the disembodied elbow comes up once again. Another reverberant silence, during which no one moves: not the spectators joined in the strangely delicious activity of collective spying, nor the object of their interest, outside their line of vision but apparently continuing with impressive reserves of patience to await a response.
Bennie snaps to. “Where’s Stalwart?”
“In the barn.”
“Go get him, please, Tom. Better let Dad field this one.”
“REAL ESTATE AGENT,” says Walter some twenty minutes later. Hands on hips, he stands at the kitchen sink watching the stranger depart on foot.
“They have their own real estate agents?” queries Bennie from the breakfast nook.
She and Carrie are the only two remaining, everyone else either having been dispatched on chores or having scurried away in avoidance of that fate.
“Evidently.”
“But why’d he come here?”
“To see if we’re interested in selling.”
“What, just randomly: Do we want to sell our house?”
“Yeah.”
“But why us in particular?”
“They’re asking everyone. Going door-to-door.”
“Like the Fuller Brush man,” says Carrie perkily. There is a thickness in the air between her sister and her brother-in-law, a quivering charge that makes her feel excluded. “Like the Girl Scouts,” she adds. She is roundly ignored.
“They’re doing it all over town.” Walter joins them in the breakfast nook.
“How do you know?” asks Bennie.
“It’s a thing.”
“What do you mean, ‘a thing’?”
“Jeff Greenberg was telling me. It’s a thing they do. The ultra-Orthodox. When they’re looking to expand into new neighborhoods, new towns, they start contacting homeowners, asking if you’re thinking about moving. They offer cash, Bennie. Wait . . .” He searches the pockets of his shorts, pulls out a business card and tosses it on the table.
WALK 2 SHUL
WE BUY HOUSES
ANY CONDITION
FAST CLOSE
ALL CASH
“Jeff was telling me how it works,” Walter continues, “how it’s already gone down in towns like New Ashkelon. At first they’ll pay above market value as an enticement to buy out residents. It doesn’t matter if your house isn’t listed. They’re persistent, and they’re patient, and they just go around asking, making impressive offers, and invariably they find some people who say yeah, why not? Pretty soon the demographic tips, the town becomes more and more majority Orthodox, the character of the community changes, public schools decline, and secular families that can afford it begin moving out. Then property values drop, and more Haredim move in.”
All three of them turn and look out the window, as if they might catch a glimpse of other real estate agents out there, other black-coated, black-hatted, black-bearded men wending along the roads of Rundle Junction, each armed with a briefcase and quiet determination.
“I thought Jeff Greenberg was the guy you didn’t like.” Carrie’s finding the whole political situation with the Jews and the trees and everything a bit confusing. It’s a challenge to sort out who’s on which side and which side, therefore, she’s on.
“Jeff’s a good guy,” says Walter. “I don’t always agree with him, but I have to say he’s done a lot of research on this, and I think he’s genuinely trying to look down the road and think about the best interests of the vill—”
“Walter!” cries Bennie. “You’re saying now you agree with Jeff?”
“I didn’t say that. Look, it’s complex. It’s seriously complicated. Listen, over in New Ashkelon the population has almost doubled in less than a decade, right? All from the Haredim. Well they’ve officially implemented—it passed last week, Jeff was just telling me—a no-knock rule to prevent real estate agents going doorto-door because it’s gotten so bad—no, let me finish, Bennie—bad in the sense of real harassment. Intimidation. When homeowners would say no thanks to selling, they’d get asked, ‘Are you sure? Why would you want to live in a Hasidic neighborhood if you’re not Hasidic? Will your family really be happy if you remain?’—stuff like that. One guy says when he declined to sell, the real estate agent put a hand on his shoulder and told him he should reconsider. Like a scene out of The Godfather.
“Anyway, Ben, I thought you were more anti-them than I was. What about your whole ‘I’m against fundamentalists of any stripe’?”
Bennie eats a whole saltine, brow furrowed, before responding. “Yeah, but you’re making me think. With your whole white-flight analogy. Let’s say the Orthodox do move in en masse. Let’s say the character of the town totally changes. I mean: okay. What right do we have to insist on maintaining our status quo? If the demographic reality is shifting? We live in a democracy. If the majority becomes people who aren’t like us, what—we just stop believing in majority rule? All this time, all this talk of democracy was just lip service? We’re in favor of it so long as we come out on top?”
Walter, elbows on the table, massages his scalp. Sighs. “I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, Bennie.” Fingers laced over his crown, he picks his head up, looks her in the eye. “But why bring it up now?”
In the way he says this—the tilt of his neck, the quiet stress on the last word, the privateness of his gaze—Carrie again feels this thing, a massive invisible hovering unvoiced thickness in the air between her sister and her brother-in-law.
“Is there something I don’t know about?” she says.
Overhead a door slams. A shout. Almost immediately, a second slam. The flush of a toilet. Footsteps trundle up and down the hall, floorboards groan and a scintilla of plaster dust rains down upon the breakfast table.
“Mom!” Mantha summons from the top of the stairs. “We neeeeed you!”
Bennie takes another saltine. With scant conviction mutters, “It’s nice to be needed.”
From overhead, more thumping. More flushing. Shrieks of gleeful revulsion. Then another slam followed by another delicate drizzle of dust. Carrie places a hand protectively over her coffee mug.
Mantha: “Better bring the plunger!”
Bennie picks up the business card. “‘Any condition,’ huh?” Shoots Walter her best deadpan. “How much did he say he was offering?”
LESTER VILNO HAS BEEN CHASED OFF. His pace is not hurried, no visible throngs pursue him, but she knows his leave-taking is regretful. She sees it in the reconciled gait of his retreat down the drive, the bent of his head on which the big black homburg slopes.
Strange that he is on foot. What happened to his bicycle?
Stolen, she thinks. Or no—vandalized, she suddenly remembers. The men around the old Glendale said. Their voices as rumbly as the smell of Mother’s coffee, dark as the grounds at the bottom of the pot. The tires slashed. Voices she has grown up knowing, voices familiar as her own hands. The seat ripped off. Their own hairy-knuckled hands strong as vises, callused and cracked, with nails blackened from working in fields and sheds, in the woods and on the ice, some of them with fingers lopped off by axes or lathes or tractor belts; these hands she has grown up knowing, grown up watching them move backgammon pieces, shake dice, tap the dottle out of their pipes. If that wasn’t enough, the frame all mangled, too. Twisted like a pretzel, they said. Twisted like a tornado, and someone made a phlegmy sound that might have been a laugh.
So old Lester Vilno had to leave on foot. Some said he walked all the way to New Ashkelon for the train. Some said he walked farther than that. With a bundle on his back bound with twine and a satchel in each hand, and no one ever knew what became of his marionettes, if he’d somehow managed to pack them all or if he’d burned them or what, but when they went into his little house after he left there was nothing in it but the furniture and a broom. Left it neat as a pin, people whispered. Hearth swept bare, dishes washed. Empty as Satan’s heart, they told each other. Not a crumb, not a cobweb. Even the windows, they whispered: scrubbed clean. Those who set foot inside said the light streaming through the panes had an uncanny clarity. A luster to set your teeth on edge.
(Well I’m glad he’s gone, says Mother late at night.
Now whatever did he do to you? says Daddy.
Glad, in bed, listening to them talk on the other side of the wall.
People should stick with their own.
Mary, says Daddy. Listen to yourself.
And Glad listens but all she hears is the bitter sound of nothing, her own blood whooshing past her ears, a black coat flapping in the empty night.)
Come back, Glad wants to call after Lester Vilno, receding. Come back! He could have a glass of tea with her here on the porch, sit awhile in the shade of the climbing sweet peas.
Ah well. She understands.
She has a train to catch, too.
A FEW MINUTES AFTER FOUR O’CLOCK the barometer suddenly drops. Updrafts build towering cumulonimbus clouds above the Taconics. The earth cools rapidly as warm air is drawn skyward and the day darkens: a squall line forms across the foothills.
AT HALF PAST FOUR Bennie looks up from the dining table, which she has been setting with uncommon care, laying out her grandmother Joy’s wedding china and her own mother’s wedding silver for the prenuptial dinner with the Digginses. For a moment she leaves off counting salad forks under her breath and registers how dark the afternoon has grown. Abandoning with a long-suffering sigh the task at hand for a more pressing one (hastening out back to gather the still-damp laundry from the line), she lodges a mental complaint against Chana: Had she not, just a few nights earlier, thumb scrolling across her smartphone, promised fair skies for the rest of the week?
WALTER, IN THE KITCHEN, in his element: aproned, kneading, running through his entire repertoire of union songs—“Bread and Roses,” “Joe Hill,” “Which Side Are You On?”—in his most voluptuous baritone. The massing clouds beyond the windows give the yeasty kitchen the feel of a lighthouse: a bright haven in a tumultuous sea. As the outer world dims and the gusts come pushing through the screens, he responds by increasing both tempo and volume. “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run / There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun / Yet what force on Earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? / For the union makes us strong!” Scooping dough from the bowl, sprinkling flour on the marble kneading board, he folds and presses, folds and presses, in time with the chorus, on which he is joined by his own two youngest and their cousins: “Solidarity forever, solidarity forever / Solidarity forever / For the Union makes us strong!”
The kids, having annexed the breakfast nook for their mail-making activities and transformed it into a riot of paper, tape, glue, scissors, stickers, markers, glitter, pencils, crayons, and, of all things, a cardboard box full of feathers (Why are you bringing all that stuff into my just-mopped kitchen? Bennie had demanded. For decorating envelopes, Mantha had replied in the manner of a high-ranking dignitary condescending to the ignorance of an underling. Of course, Bennie had replied, the patina of sarcasm lost on her audience. Silly me.), excited by the plummeting air pressure, contribute boisterously to the song.
RICHARD THE DOG, too, is sensitive to the barometric shift. He does what he is wont to do on such occasions: pee. Unfortunately, he is in the living room when the instinct overtakes him. Bennie, midway up the stairs with the rescued laundry, en route to drape the still-damp things across her bed, sees him squat (poor Richard, so unnerved he doesn’t even raise his leg in the usual manner of his sex) and yells, “No!” He looks at her in abject apology, his long curly ears drooping, then averts his gaze as the puddle between his hind legs grows, a long golden tributary flowing toward the rug.
AT A QUARTER TO FIVE, from where they have stationed themselves around the back of the barn, the roustabouts look up from their work and eye the sky. The roustabouts: Clem’s gypsy friends, her own crew of patches, her personal band of rude mechanicals, that little indeterminate clan comprising Maya and Banjo and Dave-Dave and Val, the latter with baby Harriett presently asleep in a sling upon their chest. The work to which they’ve been entrusted is top secret, thus their location out of view of the house. I need your expertise in merrymaking and mischief-making, is how Clem originally enticed them. The ceremony is going to be modeled after a pageant, she’d confided, consisting of five episodes.
She’d promised them a place to pitch their tents and almost total artistic freedom, their response to which includes the scrolls they have been painting all afternoon on swaths of brown butcher paper spread in the dirt, corners weighted with stones. The stones keep the scrolls themselves from blowing, but now as the wind kicks up, dirt and tufts of dry grass are getting scattered across the still-wet paint, and What do you think? they’ve begun asking one another. They register the hairs standing up on their arms, gauge the anvil clouds forming in the west. Working in pairs, they hustle the scrolls into the already overstuffed barn.
LLOYD AND TOM, having completed their assignment of setting up fifty-three folding chairs in horseshoe-shaped rows around the base of the black walnut tree (Lloyd: Why are we doing this now? What if it rains? Shouldn’t we wait until tomorrow? Tom: Don’t ask me. I just work here.), have snuck off on bicycles. Pedaling down the county road they note the sudden change in temperature and the darkness, but continue undeterred on their impromptu, covert mission: Lloyd has asked Tom to show him the new housing development.
AT FIVE O’CLOCK CHANA, lying and every now and then whimpering upon her sleeping bag in the orange tent—which is really too small for three people and all their things, especially after three days of said things commingling until they give off a collective smell of damp Converse, damp socks, damp pillows filled with ancient duck feathers, plus whatever chemicals they use in the factory where they make the tent (whenever she gets a migraine she acquires literally nauseatingly supernatural powers of olfaction)—has known a storm was brewing for hours. She could feel its teetering approach behind one eye, could feel its weird tumescent luminescence building there. She has unzipped the window and door flaps to allow the strong breeze to wash over her, thinking it would soothe, but as the storm front closes in, the contrast with the warm spongy air of the past few days proves so intense that it’s a kind of sensory overload. She feels she might really throw up.
“Here.” Hannah slips in and crawls over to Chana with a glass of water, three aspirins, and a cold compress. She had stumbled upon Chana by accident ten minutes earlier, when she’d entered the tent seeking her nail file (Dang, where is that sucker? I have a wicked hangnail. Did you filch it the other night when you went prowling through my things . . . Hey, what’s the matter with you?), and upon determining Chana was in real distress a new side of her had been revealed. It cannot be said Hannah exuded tenderness, exactly, but all shtick fell away—she had become quietly focused and gruffly kind. “You’re such an idiot,” she says now, case in point, supporting Chana’s head as she lifts it so she can drink. “You should have told us you lost your medication. Here”—taking out her cell—“call your doctor and tell them you need a new prescription, ASAP.”
SITTING AS SHE USED TO when she was small, heels tucked against her bottom, knees hugged against her chest, Carrie perches on the swivel chair in the office and attends to the gathering gloom. A half hour earlier she’d deserted Bennie, with whom she’d been setting the dinner table, to help Aunt Glad get settled on her cot, the latter having expressed the desire for a “short sojourn” away from all the “hullabaloo,” and she has been keeping the elderly woman company ever since. It’s rather nice to take a break from all the animated busyness, not to mention from Bennie’s peevishness.
At first they chat rather generally about the distant past, Aunt Glad responding now and then to Carrie’s reminiscences with murmurs of recognition and the occasional gentle correction or elucidation. Emboldened, Carrie segues into asking questions about the pageant of 1927, and this leads quite naturally into telling about their discovery yesterday of the name on the memorial plaque. “Who was Benjamin Erlend, Aunt Glad, do you know?” There is no answer. “Is he a relation?” After a moment: “He must be a relation.” After another moment: “He was two.”
A sound of protest from the cot where Glad lies atop the trapunto coverlet.
“What was that? I didn’t understand.”
“Three.” A tattered squawk. “He was three.”
Oh, thinks Carrie. Just that, no thoughts or words other than oh, and a sense of something too massive to be easily understood, too massive to have its parameters glimpsed, let alone mapped, settles over her, and into her, seeps through all the world.
Then for a while there is just time passing, and noises coming from the cot, feeble, anguished, mangled noises, unlike any crying Carrie has ever heard. “Oh Glad,” she murmurs, scootching the swivel chair on its casters up close to the bed. The older woman has covered her face with one hand; Carrie takes the other and holds it, egg-like, in both her own. “I’m so sorry.”
Eventually Aunt Glad makes utterances, scratched and exhausted-sounding. Carrie has to lean forward to hear. “He was going to be three the next day. There was going to be a party. There was a kit for him to make little lead soldiers. The Coldstream Guards. An angel cake. Mother had baked it. There was a toy horn covered with silver paper. Little boy blue she called him. He was my—” Her voice breaks.
“Your what?” whispers Carrie.
Glad’s mouth crimps shut. The hand that covers her eyes shakes.
“Your brother?”
“My responsibility.” Her hand drops away and she meets Carrie’s eyes with startling intensity. “And I didn’t—” It breaks again, her voice. But she is determined, she is resolute. The near-weightless hand Carrie has been cupping now grips her back with sudden, painful strength. “I couldn’t keep—I didn’t keep—my word—I lost hold of his hand . . .
“There were so many of us. Under the grandstand. And so much smoke. And so much noise. And Joy had my hand. I tried—I thought I tried—I had—I knew I was supposed to have his. But—I was afraid!” Her gaze bears into Carrie’s with a kind of horrified radiance. “I was afraid. And I didn’t—I didn’t—”
Carrie leans closer.
But Glad is finished speaking. Finished with words. She releases her grip and Carrie returns her hand to the coverlet. Her body, her features, every molecule of her placid now. She cries, but softly, effortlessly, with untroubled breath. Tears spill from her eyes and roll sideways down her face, bathing her scars, flowing across the puckered, shiny skin.
After a while they cease.
Carrie sits with her. In the swivel chair, in her child’s pose. Outside the sky has grown dark with clouds. Inside the air is striated with shadow. Carrie peers through the slippery dim: Glad’s lips are ever so slightly parted. Her hands are folded, one over the other, upon her breast, which rises and falls at what seem like distant intervals.
A FEW MINUTES PAST FIVE the first drops break free of the clouds and Clem—who has moseyed restlessly down the driveway to sit on the big rock upon which every few years Bennie repaints their house number in a new color—sticks out her tongue and tilts her face to the sky. She came out to watch for the green Volvo Diggs has told her they will be driving, she and her father and stepmother. Clem has met Keith and Johnetta Diggins twice—once in a restaurant, and once at their house in Falls Church. The house had been cleaner than any Clem had ever set foot in. And Diggs’s folks had been cordial to her in a way that made her wonder what they must have said later in private. When she confided her anxiety to Diggs, Diggs said she just didn’t understand Southern manners. I’m not saying you’re not a stretch for them, she’d allowed. When Clem’s brow knotted up all woe-is-me at this, Diggs had given Clem’s shoulder a shove. C’mon, Swiss Miss. Like I’m not a stretch for your parents?
But Clem fears she has further to go to prove herself with the Digginses. The fear of being wrong—being in the wrong—has never entirely left her. She cannot shake the notion that she keeps putting her foot wrong. The Swiss Miss epithet, however lovingly spoken, is just another reminder of the way she keeps putting her foot wrong. Even the occasion of learning her beloved’s true name had been a minor disaster.
On paper Diggs is KC Diggins, which Clem initially assumed was her given name.
“You think my parents gave me initials for a name?”
“I thought it might be cultural. What?”
The look Diggs gave her seemed to Clem rich with sediment, the nature of which she couldn’t deduce.
“I’m sorry. I’m learning, I want to learn.”
“I know, bambina.”
This had taken place just seven weeks earlier, the day after Clem’s graduation and before Diggs began her internship in DC. They’d made an appointment with the Rundle Junction village clerk and sat waiting on a bench outside his office in the great gothic sandstone building, each with her birth certificate, social security card, government-issued photo ID, and twenty-dollar bill (they’d decided it was symbolic of their equal partnership to split the marriage license fee).
“So what’s it stand for?”
Diggs made like she didn’t hear.
Clem made to grab her legal documents out of her lap and a wrestling match ensued, brought to an abrupt halt by the frowning attention of the man who’d had them sign in on a clipboard. Giggles were suppressed; items of clothing were straightened; the girl with the peridot nose stud leaned over and hissed into the taller girl’s ear.
“Come on, Chat. I’m going to find out in like five minutes anyway.”
“First you have to swear never to tell.”
“Okay.”
“Not another living soul.”
“Such drama.”
“Swear.”
“Fine, I swear. So what’s your name?”
It was Keziah Charlene, information revealed in a mortified whisper.
“But that’s beautiful! It’s so pretty, Keziah. What’s it mean? Is it African?”
“No, fool. Jewish.”
“Nah.”
“Old Testament.”
“. . . I don’t think so.”
Diggs arched an eyebrow.
“I mean, I never heard it before. You sure you’re not thinking of the Quran? What?” For Diggs had turned away, and this pique was not in jest. “No, it’s pretty.” Clem scrambled. “I like it!” She had the horrible conviction she’d said something unforgivable, but knew neither what nor how. She moved to touch Diggs’s arm, then thought better of it. “What’d I do?”
“Nothing.”
“What’s wrong?”
Minutely, without meeting her eyes, Diggs shook her head.
“Sorry.” At a loss for anything else to say, she said it again: “I’m sorry.”
“Stop. What are you even saying sorry for?”
Clem thought, I have no idea. What had she done? Nothing. By Diggs’s own account. So why was she being punished? A needle of indignation began to crystalize in her chest. She looked at her beloved. Diggs remained turned away.
Clem stared out miserably across the hallway and found Clipboard Man looking back at her. How many couples fought moments before applying for a marriage license? How many couples were denied a license, and on what grounds? How many couples had this man personally witnessed sitting on this bench over the decades—for he looked as if he’d been here many decades, looked like a permanent fixture of this place, with his pinkish skin, upright gray hair, and shrewd blue eyes. What did he see when he looked at them, mixed-race, same-sex, here in little Rundle Junction? Clem sat up taller, uncrossed her legs, and angled her nose stud to glint in his direction.
As she did, something happened inside her, something at once tiny and immense: she saw reality. Saw that while she fantasized he was judging them, she most emphatically was judging him. And that was enough to cause her to lift her attention from the endlessly captivating whorl of her own existence and perceive three more things: that Diggs was suffering, that she did not understand why, and that she could ask. “Sweetheart?”
It was the first time in her life she had called someone that.
“Sweetheart?” Clem began.
SOME FIVE DECADES LATER, after they have split up and gotten back together and split up again; after Diggs has clerked for Sotomayor and served as General Counsel for the Virginia Department of Child and Family Services and then as Representative for that state’s third congressional district; after Clem has gone through rehab and then doula training and attended the births of over three hundred babies and become an advocate for reproductive justice working especially in the area of women in prison; long after they have fallen out of touch and kept up with what the other is doing only through the occasional item on their social networks or newsfeeds; only then will the two bump into each other at a fund-raiser for the first transgender person to become the presidential nominee of a major political party and resume—or more accurately, strike up a new—close friendship.
Only then, when they are in their seventies and sitting by the gas fire one winter evening in Diggs’s Foggy Bottom town house, Diggs (who, before reconnecting with Clem, won’t have been called Diggs by anyone in decades) nursing a bourbon and Clem sipping ginger tea, will they speak of that moment outside the village clerk’s office when Clem had doubted the provenance of Diggs’s name, that moment when a chasm opened between them there on the bench in the old sandstone building, a moment of irredeemable distance, until Clem spoke across it, sent a question (“Sweetheart?”) across the chasm like an arrow with a silken cord tied to the end, and Diggs caught the arrow and shot it back with another length of silk, and strand by strand then they began fashioning an earnest if tenuous bridge.
There in Diggs’s living room, with its scarlet-and-rust-colored rug and its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and its mahogany wainscoting and glossy-leafed ficus, its tall windows with feathery snow falling outside, its shadows softened by the light of orange flames flickering in the grate; there Clem, bringing the black Japanese stoneware mug to her chin and letting the fragrant vapor envelop her face, will say, I’m sure you don’t even remember it but I’ve thought of that moment—the moment I understood how much I didn’t understand, how much I would never understand, and how I therefore, from that moment on, would always be responsible for trying—I think of it, it’s funny but I’ve always thought of it as the moment I in a way became an adult, or no, became a person really, a really and truly full human being. And Diggs, in a voice raspy and laden, suddenly, with something heavy, something making it crack (Clem, looking over, will be amazed to see tears glittering in her eyes) will say, Bambina. That was the moment I started to believe we were possible, you and me.
LIGHTNING. IN THE KITCHEN all the windowpanes flare magnesium white for a split second, as if Ellerby’s imaginary camera had a real flash. The scene she has just snapped: her uncle Walter in his striped apron baking and singing, her little cousins across the table from her, scribbling letters and singing along. The thunder that follows is a great cracking clap that makes the children scream, at first just the little ones but a split second later Ellerby, too, screaming for the fun of it and for the sake of belonging.
LLOYD AND TOM arrive at the building site at the height of the cloudburst. Everything’s so slippery it takes Tom a few minutes to Kryptonite the bikes to the hurricane fence, but at last he gets the lock in place and the truth is neither of them minds the weather; they figure it’s on their side because the place looks deserted. Sneakers squelching, they walk around the fence until they spot the swastikas, one on the side of the trailer, two on the new building itself. They’re uglier than Lloyd had imagined, if you can say such a thing about swastikas: messily executed, as though done in a hurry, with copious drips.
“It’s not who I thought it might be,” says Tom.
“No?”
He shakes his head. “Whoever did this is no graffiti artist. That’s bad can control. The guys I know take pride in their work.”
Lloyd is amused by Tom’s professional disdain. And made suspicious by it. “How’s your can control?” he ventures.
“I suck,” Tom admits. “But I’ve only tried it twice.”
Hm, says the look on Lloyd’s face.
When he’d asked his nephew if they could check out the building site together, Tom had been visibly wary. “Why?” And when Lloyd said he wanted to see for himself what lay at the center of all the fuss over zoning and wetlands and anti-Semites and affordable housing and preserving tradition, Tom had been visibly surprised. “Mom always says you couldn’t care less about Rundle Junction.”
Lloyd had scratched his armpit. “She’s not wrong,” he said. “Rundle Junction qua Rundle Junction.” He said qua in a way intended to show he was not really that guy who goes around using the word qua.
The truth is, he’s more interested in Tom. Or more precisely: he’s interested in Tom’s interest. Not because it reminds him of himself at that age, but for the very reason that it doesn’t. As if Tom’s his converse, a version of who he might have been if he hadn’t been himself. If he’d had a certain kind of appetite he’s always lacked. That’s it, really: he wants to fathom his lack.
Circling the site now in the downpour, they come to an unchained gate. Tom gives it a push; it yields.
“Security cameras,” cautions Lloyd. This was not part of the plan.
Tom shrugs. “Then the cameras will show it was open—we didn’t break in.” He enters the construction area. After a moment, Lloyd follows.
THUNDER RUMBLING. Departure board tumbling. Wooden slat after wooden slat. Clatter of symbols juddering by. Too fast for the eye to decipher.
Train’s approaching. Gusting into the station. Billowing behind it damp pearly plumes.
Who’s Benjamin? someone’s asking. Little boy blue. That’s what we called him. Until we stopped calling him anything at all.
Little boy blue, Mother calls, come blow your horn while the bath is warm. He only chortles. Eels away naked down the hall.
Naughty little angel. Never got his cake.
Never mind. She’s bringing some with her. It’s in that bundle tied with twine.
RICHARD THE DOG, exiled, slinks miserably across the yard. Drenched, he looks feral. Fear makes his hind legs tremble. Gives him a furtive, diagonal gait. Lightning charges the world once more as he reaches the barn, shivering and gaunt with his fur plastered to his body, only to find the great sliding doors have been pulled shut. He paws them, barks. Waits. Barks again, sharply. Paws again. Waits. Turns away, toenails skidding and slipping over pebbles as he seeks alternative shelter.
INSIDE THE BARN at five fifteen the roustabouts lay the lengths of butcher paper over heaps of old furniture and farm equipment. They managed to get everything inside moments before the rain began coming down in earnest and the painted words and images are mostly intact; now they work to lay them flat so they can dry. The deluge is deafening, as if the contents of a massive piggy bank were crashing down upon the corrugated tin roof. Careful, there’s a leak to your right, they warn one another. Can you move that back a foot? Water’s coming in over here, too. Once the scrolls are settled, they get to settling themselves, pulling up half-broken chests and stools, a rusty icebox, an ice cream maker with a broken crank. Val, still with Harriett slung around their chest, finds a place to roost on what looks to be an old butter churn. Banjo produces from the pocket of his carpenter shorts, as if it were the most humdrum thing in the world, a dry-cured soppressata. Maya slides a horn-handled penknife from the shaft of her boot and tosses it to him. Dave-Dave fishes from his own pocket a bag of Swedish Fish. They partake in a picnic of salami and candy while waiting out the storm.
HAVING EVICTED RICHARD, Bennie snatches one of the freshly laundered towels from the basket and uses it to sop his urine, at least the portion that hasn’t already seeped into the rug. For that she goes into the kitchen to fetch paper towels and disinfectant from underneath the sink, rehearsing in her mind: Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Diggins, so nice to finally meet you. What’s that smell, you ask? Oh, just a little dog urine. Won’t you please make yourselves at home? In the kitchen she is greeted like Shackleton returning to Elephant Island. Mommy! Mom! Aunt Bennie, thee what we’re making! She is clasped about the waist and led by both hands over to the breakfast nook to ooh and aah over the handmade cards, the envelopes all painstakingly addressed to various guests. We’re almost ready to start delivering them! She tells them great job, tells them she can see that neither snow nor rain nor the need to actually get things done before fifty thousand wedding guests arrive will deter them from their course. Not fifty thousand! she’s admonished. Okay, she concedes, fifty, and squats by Walter’s legs to extract cleaning supplies from the cupboard. Another flash of lightning comes, then immediately a thunder crack she feels in her throat. The children all scream, transported by a kind of fearsome ecstasy, and the air smells weirdly pink and she notices a big raised bruise on one of Walter’s shins, the sight of which, for all its ordinariness—because of its very ordinariness—ambushes her with tenderness. Our foot hurts us, she thinks. Welling with more affection, more gratitude and pity, than she can possibly bear. No wonder she gets a head rush when she stands again, Lysol in hand. She has to steady herself against his chest. You okay? He encircles her waist with floury arms. She nuzzles his ear, murmurs, Fucking dog peed the rug. He squeezes her more tightly. She is as happy as she’s ever been.
BY FIVE TWENTY, the puddle of rain gathered on the roof of the water-resistant nylon tent has begun leaking through. Hannah and Chana, side by side on their backs, watch drips collect in succession on the inside of the fabric, watch as each one swells and finally breaks free to descend with a fat splash on Chana’s face. “It bizarrely helps,” the migraine victim croaks, frailly optimistic.
“Getting rained on? Let’s notify the NIH.”
“More like the meditative thing of waiting for each drop to fall.”
The next round of lightning brings a nearly simultaneous thunder crack. They feel it in their chests, feel it in the earth beneath their bodies.
“What about flirting with death?” Hannah asks. “Does flirting with death also help?”
A contemplative pause. “I think yes.”
Hannah laughs. “That was funny.”
“Really?”
“Literally.”
The door flap is breeched by a large snout, rapidly followed by an entire dripping mongrel, tail declaring delight over having found sanctuary at last, paws trampling the lumpy terrain of sleeping bags, knapsacks, and bodies.
“Ow! Oh my God, Richard, could you please smell a little more like wet dog?”
They sit up, the Ch/Hannahs, trying unsuccessfully to fend off the particular excesses of canine happiness, each of them thinking At least there’s not enough room in here for him to shake just before he showers them and all their possessions with eau de chien.
“Okay, babe, that’s our cue,” says Hannah, taking matters (and Chana) in hand. They squeeze out of the tent and make a break for the house, Hannah still in her nursemaid role, leading the afflicted one; both of them with their bare feet sliding on the slippery mud and newly mown grass; Chana, her head still pounding but less acutely now, repeating a silent mantra of sweet surprise: She called me babe; she called me babe!
CLEM IS STANDING on one foot in the front hall, peering out the window to the left of the door nobody uses, which suits her purposes as just now she is wanting to be solitary, to watch in private for the arrival of her intended, whose face at the moment, disconcertingly, she can’t quite recall. More disconcerting: neither can she at the moment recall why she thought this was such a good idea—holding a wedding, summoning family and friends to attend a ceremony of love and mischief, a subversive wink of a ceremony sure to evoke her thesis adviser’s famously gabbling, hacking laughter when he is here tomorrow to take part in the ceremony. This is one of the surprises she has up her sleeve: he has agreed not merely to be one of the guests but to play an important role in the performance. (For a performance is, when you come right down to it, what the wedding—any wedding, but especially this one—is.) Her feet have tracked mud and grass clippings through the front hall, and where she stands a puddle forms. The hall clock reads five thirty-two. The Digginses are an hour late. An hour later than Diggs had said they’d be. Pushing away thoughts of slick highways, low visibility, and traffic pileups, rubbing her wet hair and then wiping her dirty feet with an embroidered guest towel (the very same one Bennie had laid, neatly folded, on the powder room vanity not an hour ago), she strains to make out the driveway through the rain-crazed glass.
WALTER, HIS ARMS still around Bennie’s waist, his nose level with the top of her head, closes his eyes and inhales. His wife smells of the same no-frills brand of coconut cream rinse she uses to detangle Mantha’s mop. He smells also the trio of loaves now in the oven, along with a charred aroma that means Tom has been making frozen pizzas again without bothering to put tinfoil on the lower rack to catch the drips. Although the new pregnancy has not yet declared itself in a publicly obvious way, Bennie’s body is ampler today than it was a couple of months ago, and holding her now with the knowledge that she is holding, deep within her, yet another co-creation of theirs, he feels at once sated and hungry. The kids have stopped screaming but keep up a volatile chatter that spirals excitedly as the porch door opens. Without lessening his embrace he opens his eyes and sees, over the top of Bennie’s head, the bedraggled Ch/Hannahs enter hand in hand. From behind them, just before the screen door slaps shut, a dark daemon comes streaking through the kitchen in a frenzy, toenails scrabbling over the just-mopped-this-morning floor. Even farther behind them, a light pulses red (could it be lightning?) then (no it couldn’t) blue.
IT’S FIVE THIRTY-SEVEN when Carrie unfolds her legs and rises from the swivel chair. In a kind of slow motion, holding her breath for some reason she cannot name, she bends over the cot. The rain striking the window is so noisy and chaotic she cannot be sure—is the sense of movement coming from Aunt Glad a sign that she is dreaming, or is it merely the dance of liquid light across the trapunto coverlet, across her crepey skin? Is it just the storm that makes her eyelids appear to flicker with whatever visions sleep has brought? Or is it a function of whatever visions are visiting the old woman in her sleep? She brings her cheek close to Aunt Glad’s nostrils.
Lightning rends the atmosphere.
A scorched smell, a splitting sound.
Rupture irradiates her very trunk.
FOURTH NOCTURNE
THE NIGHT MAIL
In the kitchen the letterboxes gleam dully. The dark tonight is like a canceling. The constellations are hidden, the moon no more than an idea. Visible or no, the letterboxes have become full of letters, their ordinary contents having been shifted and recombined—cardamom and coriander now intermixed with pot holders and egg timers, the lemon zester bedded with the strawberry huller, the candy and meat thermometers laid down like lion and lamb—in order to vacate two rows of cubbies for the children’s missives.
Dear Clem, Happy wedding!!!! What flavor is you’re cake?
Uncle Walter, Thanks for the bred. The sharp parts herted my mowth but its good.
Dear Aunt Glad, I like your skin the pink and wite parts are pretty.
Dear Diggs, Roses are red, violets are blue, if you have a paddle, you can canoe.
Hi Harriett, How’s life?
Tom, Congrajulations on not getting arrested. Haha just kidding. Thanks for saving my place on line (bathroom).
Dear Mommy, When can we go to Chuck E. Cheeses? I’m bored.
Dear Lloyd, I am writing this in cursive. I am writing this in print.
Dear Chana, I have one VERY loose and one growing in. Three already growed. One cavity. Sharks teeth fall out every week. Also snails have teeth on their tongues.
Dear Benjamin, Sory you dide.
All these and more have been painstakingly composed and inscribed and folded and fitted into bulky envelopes sealed with staples and tape, then decorated with drawings and doilies and bits of ribbon, as well as food coloring and flower petals and feathers. They roost in silence, the letters, in the dark kitchen, nestled in their dovecote like a congress of living, dreaming sleepers.
Glued to one envelope is a border of what appear to be little pink beads. Moments ago, one of these beads was prized off and nibbled by the long yellow incisors of a mouse, misled by the sugar coating. Some twelve hours hence, it will be determined by none other than the letter’s addressee that they are actually her own missing prescription tablets.
THE MOUSE
Poor little mouse. How delicious she found the round thing at first—the sweetness (nicely complemented by the savor of dried glue) delighted her taste receptors, and as she chewed her bright little eyes took in greedily the rest of the crooked pink row—but soon after swallowing the last bit she discovers it is not to her liking after all. Her heart races. Her appetite vanishes. Her whiskers twitch double-time while the rest of her body goes statue-still.
Is her anxiety triggered by the dose of synthetic estrogen and progestin she just ingested? Or by the bolt of lightning that just flashed? Does it remind her of last weekend’s storm? For this happens to be the same young mouse who crunched the beetle three nights ago in the wall behind Aunt Glad’s cot. Could she be remembering how the rain lasted four days and flooded her nest and drowned her first litter, all five pups, still hairless, still sightless, still with their earflaps pressed flat against their scalps?
MEMORY
Scientists have found evidence that mice have episodic memory—that is, the ability to recall who, what, where, and when. Not only that. Scientists have performed experiments in which they have been able to enhance mouse memory through the manipulation of a single gene. They claim to have successfully implanted false memories in mice. Perhaps most extraordinarily of all, they have demonstrated in mice the phenomenon of epigenetic memory—that is, the memory of an occurrence affecting one generation being genetically transmitted to the next. They report that mice conditioned to associate the smell of cherry blossoms with electric shocks bear offspring who, even in the absence of having experienced pain themselves, display an aversion to the same scent. The baby mice shudder when the fragrance is wafted before them. And their offspring in turn, the grandchildren of those who experienced the actual suffering, evince the same behavior. Without telling the story, without writing it down, without any tangible means of communication, some knowledge is being passed along from one generation to the next. Like a train that somehow makes its way from one village to another, or rather from one time to another, along unseen rails.
Now our mouse unfreezes. Gradually her heart rate returns to normal. She recommences her nocturnal scavenging, slipping deftly from her current cubbyhole to the one above, in which she finds nothing to eat. But a different treasure captivates her attention here: a plumulaceous feather of pearly gray that she tears with her long incisors from the piece of heavy construction paper to which it had been glued. She wants it for her new nest, which she is building under the front steps nobody ever uses.
Already a new generation is growing inside her womb.
THE MOON
Tonight in Rundle Junction for all practical purposes there is no moon. No sign of it is visible through the clouds. No dark marias, no pale highlands. No matter: our companion of four and a half billion years, our nearest neighbor little more than a billion feet away, isn’t going anywhere. (Actually it is. Actually it is sidling steadily away, by minuscule increments: an inch and a half a year. But still we continue to exert influence over each other, the moon causing our oceans to slosh to and fro, the earth lashing the moon once a month with its magnetotail, stippling its surface with electrons and whipping up storms of lunar dust.)
The moon is by definition strange to us. Terra incognita, unheimlich, not-home. For millennia we have tried to fathom it: via selenography and selenomancy, poetry and algebra, robots and rockets. In 1994, a spacecraft named Clementine spent more than two months mapping the lunar surface. It sent back to earth in excess of a million and half images. This was the first expedition to offer evidence of water ice on the moon. Water! We know water. We have water, too.
The craft had been named after the old folk ballad, for it was understood from the beginning that, equipped with fuel enough only to complete its mission, it would after that time be lost and gone forever.
Clem Blumenthal had been at the time two. A full-bellied toddler who spoke to the moon in long strings of babble no one could understand. One June night her parents took her to the ice cream stand out on Route 7. Sitting on one of the benches with her cone she’d become so transfixed by the startling appearance of the moon—her same moon! the one she saw out of her own window at home!—which had somehow followed her here, that she’d let ice cream leak down her hand and drip off her elbow while she stood up on the bench and alerted all the unenlightened souls returning to their cars, beseeching, “Look, people, the moon! Come back! The moon!”
TRANSIT
For once it’s midnight and neither Tom nor Lloyd is prowling about. Tom lies alone in the room he shares with Pim (who has already completed his nightly shuffle down the hall to their parents’ bed), his strapping frame curled in the fetal position he still, at sixteen, has not outgrown. A rain-swollen breeze swishes through the open door of their tiny screened-in balcony and through the single large window at the foot of his bed, making the venetian blinds toss and slap, a sound he does not hear. Meanwhile Lloyd sprawls on the futon one flight up, naked except for his wristwatch. For once the little attic room is not sweltering. Now and then, out the window: a flash of violent, violet light, a sight he does not see. Both nephew and uncle, after having caused others a fair amount of unnecessary consternation on a day that was already highly eventful, are down for the count.
Those red-and-blue lights Walter had glimpsed over Bennie’s shoulder mid-embrace in the kitchen earlier had turned out to be a squad car making its way, for the second time in two days, up the drive. The police had come this time not to locate Tom but to deliver him, along with Lloyd, the two of them emerging one after the other from the vehicle looking not especially remorseful. Walter did step outside in time to hear his son tell the officers, Sorry, we kind of got your car soaked, but dripping on the backseat of the cruiser seemed to mark the limit of Tom’s range of contrition.
One of the officers was the same Vin Diesel guy from the other night. His partner this time was a woman who looked no older than Clem. Both wore police hats covered in a kind of elasticized plastic, like shower caps. They escorted Tom and Lloyd up to the porch and there, over the din of the rain, the female officer recounted to Walter the series of events leading up to this moment—how, while on routine patrol, she and her partner had observed two bicycles chained to the hurricane fence at the construction site and upon investigating the area on foot had found Tom and Lloyd eating an apple in the cab of a front-end loader, where they reported they’d gone to seek shelter from the rain. Seeing as the gate had been left unlocked; seeing as neither the minor nor the adult had any suspicious items on his person (no spray paint or any other tools that might be linked to intent to vandalize); and seeing as both had been cooperative, the officers had decided, after verbally collecting some personal information and inspecting the driver’s license of the adult, to bring them both back to the minor’s place of residence. We will be filing an incident report, Vin Diesel had apprised Walter in his heavy-lidded, thick-necked soft-spoken way, and I can’t say what the owner might do. Whether they’re going to press charges.
Tom, he said then, turning to face him directly. Walter both resented and admired the patience with which he waited until Tom shifted his own gaze to meet the officer’s before continuing. I’m telling you now to stay away from that property. I don’t want you going within a hundred yards of it. Understand?
Walter expected his son to talk back, to inquire on what legal basis the police could place such a restriction on his mobility, something like that, but Tom was uncharacteristically docile. His Yeah, I understand was barely audible above the rain.
To Walter the female cop said, We understand the other gentleman is your brother-in-law and his permanent residence is out of state, is that correct?
Walter agreed that it was.
Then Vin Diesel said, Can we speak to you alone, sir?
Walter indicated they could. With a gesture, he sent Tom and Lloyd into the house, then listened as the cop, reducing his decibel level even further and thereby elevating the authority with which he spoke even more, told him they had reason to believe they knew who was responsible for the graffiti, and that neither Tom nor Lloyd was suspect. I can’t share any other information at this time. Reason I’m telling you is because I need you to keep them away from the property—understand? We got the guy, the last thing we need is to complicate things. Understand?
Burning with resentment at being addressed like a child, burning with curiosity to know who had done it, and burning with anxiety over being made to promise something he actually had little power to deliver, Walter allowed that he did.
Not until the squad car was halfway back down the driveway did he go into the kitchen to confront Tom and Lloyd, slouching sheepishly near the pantry, only to find himself speechless. Again it was his own father who came back to him, the image of Myron glaring in disbelief after he’d committed some act of colossal stupidity; Myron saying, What do you got, a loch in kop? A hole in the head. Walter could feel himself glaring at Tom and Lloyd now in exactly the same way. The bozos, the lunkheads—what in hell were they thinking? That they were righteous revolutionaries. Yeah: Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela as portrayed by Cheech and Chong.
Involuntarily, the two bozos glanced at each other. Big mistake. They found themselves in a pitched battle to suppress bouts of laughter.
Half an hour earlier, sitting in the cab of the front-end loader, Tom had been on the verge of lighting the apple pipe he’d carved earlier that day when they saw a couple of cops traipsing across the building site. Shit, said Lloyd. We’re cool, Tom assured him. Easy for you to say—you’re a minor. I’m a middle-aged indigent. But Tom was unfazed. Here, eat up. He handed the weed-packed apple to Lloyd, tearing off a large chunk with his own teeth first. Between them, passing it back and forth and crunching with applied muscle and speed, they managed to devour it to the core—which Tom stuck in the baggie that had held the weed. He shoved his lighter in the crack of the seat just as the officers reached the truck and ordered them to climb out, still chewing. By then what was left of the pipe looked as wholesome as anything a mom would find cleaning out a lunch box after school. In fact—it was a genius touch, for Tom could have stuffed the baggie down inside the seat along with the lighter—it made Tom look like a nice kid, a kid who’d been brought up not to litter, not even something biodegradable like an apple core.
In two weeks’ time it will be public knowledge that the graffitist is neither a neo-Nazi railing against the spread of Orthodox Jews in Putnam County nor a lackey of the Grand Rebbe trying to increase sympathy by staging an anti-Semitic threat, but what the newspapers will call a “troubled teen” with a “history of mental illness,” whose mother is a Reconstructionist rabbi and whose father is a clinical neuropsychologist.
But for now, unaware of all this and beginning to surmise from the look on Walter’s face just how much trouble they may yet find themselves in, if not with law enforcement then with their own flesh and blood, Tom and Lloyd launched into a welter of apologies and declared their readiness to submit to any kind of labor Walter wanted to assign them.
Again Walter opened his mouth—only to be interrupted three times in quick succession: first by a crack of lightning so close he felt it in his sternum; second by the sight of a late-model pine-green Volvo with Virginia plates gliding up the drive; and third by Bennie. Who came into the room with a tentative, almost tiptoeing tread. And looked at Walter with bewildered, silent effort for several seconds, as though waiting for her voice to swim up from wordless depths, before saying, “Something’s wrong with Aunt Glad.”
AUNT GLAD HAD BEEN UNRESPONSIVE when Bennie, summoned by Carrie, had first gone in to see her. Carrie said she thought Aunt Glad was not breathing, but when Bennie accompanied her back into the room, they were both able to see the rise and fall of her chest. Her color seemed off, but then the whole room seemed off, what with the storm, which had a flattening effect, like an emerald-gray iron bearing down on all light.
Bennie took one of Glad’s hands and held it much as Carrie had earlier, between both of her own. It was mottled and noticeably cool. She stroked it gently and spoke with quavering intensity. Aunt Glad? It’s Bennie. Can you hear me? Aunt Glad? Do you feel all right? Are you sleeping? Do you hear me? And then, shifting gears, summoning a kind of soothing sturdiness, as if she were speaking to one of her children, sick with fever or lost in nightmare: We’re with you, Aunt Glad, Carrie and I are both here by your bed, and it’s raining outside, and it’s summertime, and all is well, everything is okay. We’re here.
She looked meaningfully at Carrie, then laid Aunt Glad’s hand by her side, while Carrie smoothed the coverlet more comfortably over her feet. They stepped outside the office and held a whispered conversation.
Should we call someone?
Like who?
An ambulance?
She’s peaceful now.
True.
Did you see her hands?
Did you see her nails? They’re blue.
What would they even do?
Who?
An ambulance.
We’re not calling an ambulance.
I agree.
Can you imagine all they’d do to her at the hospital? Lights, IVs, monitors, for what?
I agree.
She’s peaceful. She’s home.
Agreed.
Another fantastic crack of lightning simultaneous with thunder. They both whipped their heads to look at Aunt Glad, but she remained perfectly still. Carrie had gone back into the room to sit with her then, while Bennie had gone to find Walter, and of course this was precisely the moment when their daughter’s beloved arrived at last from Falls Church, the moment when Diggs, all but a stranger to them, was, along with her father and stepmother, stepping out of the green Volvo and hurrying through the rain toward the porch.
It was an evening of convergences, an evening of dizzying motion, people revolving in and out of rooms, shifting together and apart like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, and there were both public and private roles to be performed, depending on where one found oneself and with whom, so that it felt a bit like a theater with one set of rules applying to conduct onstage and another set entirely in the wings. Bennie did her best to behave as a welcoming hostess and auspicious future in-law, offering to take the Digginses’ raincoats, bringing them drinks, groping to remember what other things she had planned to do (put out cheese and crackers? ask about the drive? show them around the house?), while Walter, true to his nickname, dispensed hearty hugs and handshakes even while being the one to keep dinner progressing as planned, remembering to take the chicken from its marinade and arrange it on rack and pan—they would do it under the broiler this evening instead of grilling out in the rain—and Clem and the Ch/Hannahs materialized with, respectively, shrieks of greeting for Diggs and more dignified niceties for her parents. They looked unabashedly slovenly, with bits of mud and grass stuck to their bare legs, and their hair matted and stringy from various escapades out in the storm. Sometime during all this the roustabouts traipsed in from the barn, Harriett howling like a banshee (it was gratifying to have proof she was a normal baby after all, though the timing of her fussing could have been more felicitous), and then there was Bennie pulling Clem aside, pulling her into the powder room, in fact, because with all the bodies swirling around the downstairs it seemed the only immediate option for discreet communication (What? Mom! was Clem’s initial piqued response), and there by the sink, with the little shell-shaped guest soaps they never used and that looked unfriendly and pretentious to them both, Bennie told her about Aunt Glad’s seeming to have slipped into a kind of not coma, I wouldn’t call it, but something . . . no, Clem, I’m not being dramatic, if anything we may be under . . . though I don’t think, at her age, more intervention would . . . well anyway: we’re just going to wait and see, but I thought you should know.
And poor Mr. and Mrs. Diggins (Keith and Johnetta, they insisted on being called), who beneath their gracious expressions of concern (because of course the Blumenthals didn’t, in the end, try to keep it a secret that Clem’s great-grandaunt had taken a sudden turn and was lying unwell in the back room) seemed understandably weirded out, said they couldn’t possibly stay for dinner (But we have plenty of food, and we’ve been so much looking forward to this!) under the circumstances, but would just finish their drinks and go check in at the Garrison Inn.
Their drinks: white wine with an ice cube for Johnetta, who wore a beige crepe blouse and a shell-pink skirt a few shades lighter than her fingernails; coffee with cream for Keith, who wore an apple-green polo tucked into single-pleated slacks that fell beautifully from his trim waist. For Diggs, water. Diggs looked both ill at ease and stunning in a sleeveless black ribbed bodycon dress, silver gladiator sandals, silver bangles. How evident, in this environment, was their foreignness—the Blumenthals’ foreignness, that is, their thoroughgoing oddness, not to mention the eccentric ramshackle shabbiness of their home. All three Digginses comported themselves with an elegant economy of motion, a kind of kinesthetic self-control. Not that they were stiff. Johnetta had laid an easy hand on Bennie’s arm when the latter, explaining the situation with Aunt Glad, had choked up and gone silent midsentence, and the touch had not been perfunctory; on the contrary, the other woman had pressed her fingers really warmly against Bennie’s arm. And Keith emitted the extravagant munificence of a certain kind of Christian outreach worker (he did, in fact, Clem would later report, teach Sunday school in addition to coaching a K–1 soccer team)—he asked Tom if he had an opinion about whether the Yankees were going to the Series this year (Tom allowed that he did not), asked Otis how he managed to tell himself apart from his brother (Otis blinked, slack-jawed, until Mantha clued him in: He’s being funny), and hailed Pim as Little Man (Pim, after a moment’s pause, let it be known that the correct appellation was Iron Man).
Diggs herself was quiet. But is that true? No one besides Clem knew her very well; now it was hard to remember whether she’d been more gregarious on those earlier occasions or if this was simply her way. Next to Clem she did seem notably . . . what was the word? Adult. Not only her sartorial élan, but her whole comportment, the way she sat on the gold settee beside Johnetta (in Glad’s spot, the family could not help but think), sipping her water and patting her mouth every now and then with one of the red paper cocktail napkins that Mantha, of all people, had remembered to fetch from the kitchen and pass around. Clem, whose fluttering nerviness might have been partly due to seeing for herself Aunt Glad’s precipitous decline (after the powder room conference, she slipped into the office only to emerge minutes later red-eyed and strangely excited, as if charged with new, directionless urgency), and partly run-of-the-mill pre-wedding jitters, sat on the floor with her bridesmaids and dispensed for the benefit of her fiancée and future in-laws a rush of breathily patchworked stories about Aunt Glad’s life. Was there something more to her disquiet, though? A few times she reached up to grasp Diggs’s fingers, Diggs, who only gave her a brief squeeze before removing her hand back to her lap. “I waited for you on the rock at the end of the driveway,” Clem whispered at one point, going up on her knees to bring her mouth close to Digg’s ear. “That’s why I’m all wet!” The smile Diggs gave in acknowledgment struck those who noticed as reserved.
Other family members rotated through, some gathering in the living room to exchange pleasantries with the Digginses, others making their way discreetly into the office; an unspoken consensus having arisen, it seemed, among Glad Erlend’s descendants that they would not, while she hovered in her ambiguous state, allow her to be unattended. Lloyd was first to relieve Carrie at Glad’s bedside (he was only too happy to have reason not to socialize with the newcomers). Perhaps he was slightly less than grateful when, a little while later, he was relieved by Tom, who was himself replaced in turn by Bennie and Walter, the one leaning back against her husband’s chest, the other with his chin lightly touching the side of his wife’s head. During this the younger ones drifted in and out, all of them grave of mouth and unnaturally graceful of posture, full of finely meshed respect and curiosity. At some point someone turned on the floor lamp, which cast a warm yellow glow at the foot of the cot. At some other point someone brought in the old pink mohair blanket from the cane chair on the porch and spread it on top of the trapunto coverlet. And at still another point the chicken, forgotten in the oven, set off the smoke alarm and brought Walter running into the kitchen, where he set with a clatter one blackened sheet pan on the floor while he reached to pull out the other, and at this opportune juncture Richard the dog galumphed along, dove with nary a pause to seize in his jaws one burned breast, and fled with it through the porch door. Shortly thereafter the Digginses, Diggs included, shook hands all around and fled through the same.
As did the roustabouts, who—bless their initially unwelcome hearts—embarked on their second pizza run in as many days.
Bennie and Carrie went back into the office to check on Aunt Glad, who lay just as they had left her: eyes closed; hands, patterned lace-like with purple and white, crossed just below her breast. “Like Snow White,” said Mantha solemnly. She was sitting at the end of the cot.
“Get down,” said Bennie.
“What? I’m not bothering her.” But Mantha slid off. Then lingered, placing a hand over one of Aunt Glad’s feet beneath the covers.
“Sweetheart, you might be. We don’t know.” So rare was it for Bennie to say sweetheart that tears came to Carrie’s eyes.
Otis and Hugh and Pim appeared in the doorway, holding between them the old Parcheesi game whose box depicted an elephant in magnificent robes, with a little throne thing perched high on its back. “Can we play in here?” asked Otis.
Eyes solemn behind his glasses, Hugh said, “We promith to be quiet.”
“That’s not—” began Bennie, but Carrie stopped her with a look.
“Why not?” she granted the boys. To Bennie, in a private register, “If she is . . . sentient, what could be sweeter than—?” And she indicated the children arranging the game now with great gingerly decorum on the office floor. Their movements held the intentionality of a tea ceremony. And their care was contagious; Mantha sank beside them and asked which color she could be. Pretty soon Ellerby found her way into the room, too, for once not in paparazzi mode but just to play.
And so it came to pass that on the night Aunt Glad at last embarked on the initial part of the journey she had long if disjointedly been anticipating, her youngest descendants were there to see her off.