PART 2

Jane And Lauren

Then pray that the road is long.

That the summer mornings are many,

that you will enter ports seen for the first time

with such pleasure, with such joy!

Stop at Phoenician markets,

and purchase fine merchandise,

mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,

and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,

buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;

visit hosts of Egyptian cities,

to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

—Cavafy, “Ithaca”

1

Lauren is sitting cross-legged on her meditating pillow in front of a houseplant. She has had a long day, you can tell from the lines in her forehead. Her mud-caked work boots are on newspaper in the corner. Dirt is worked into the creases of her deep-tanned hands.

She is attaining peace. Her lips and eyelids are slightly parted, so that the strong straight teeth and opaque eye-whites gleam through slits. Her hands rest palm-up on her knees, thumbs and middle fingers forming egg-shaped holes, receptors of energy. She is probably pondering a koan like one hand clapping, or a tree falling in the forest when no one is around to hear it. What Saskia would like to know is, if you don’t ponder these problems, are they then not problems?

The plant is a magnificent bat-wing begonia, taller than Saskia, its leaves glowing veinily in the purple evening light. Three sprays of frosted red flowers stick out yellow tongues. Lauren’s plants and vegetables fetch good prices at the Farmers’ Market because she meditates with them, praising them. In return she says they take her out of herself into their alien lives, their calm and undemanding rootedness. “Plants are natural Taoists,” she has told Saskia. “People chase illusions. Plants are.”

“Mm?” she murmurs now, sensing Saskia’s presence.

“Dinner’s ready.”

White-on-the-Water’s communal dinners are a daily ritual, a holdover from when the farm was a commune. If you don’t want to come to dinner, Lauren gets on your case for being too individualistic, not vegetable enough. The commune existed back when Saskia was young and Thomas was here, along with many others who have since gone away. Several people worked on the farm then, not just Lauren, and Saskia remembers the chaotic plantings, the crop failures. She also remembers endless talking, poetry readings, vans in the field, people on their way to India or just back from it, folksens and barns walking around buck naked. There were prayer wheels, huts, a guru named Truth. People had names the guru gave them: Laughter, Grass, Star. Lauren was Striding Tree.

At first the commune was called Wonderland, and those were the days of hemp and LSD, endless talks and buck nakedness. Then it was renamed Godhead and drugs were banned. Women covered themselves and talking stopped, though the dances went on, sometimes all night. The guru went to live in a tower the commune built for him on top of a geodesic dome.

Amazingly enough, although she was only four when it ended, Saskia remembers all this. Well, not exactly. She does remember, though, looking at some old photos and having one out of ten questions answered by Lauren. Those grudging answers go back so far, they have become indistinguishable from Saskia’s own memories.

Upstairs the twins are a mound of giggles under Mim’s covers in the dark and Mim is stalking them, growling. “Wash your hands, everybody, and get to dinner. On the double.” Complaints, resentful looks. Crews can be like that, you can’t worry overmuch about it. Quinny is on the lower deck, kneeling in a circle with his dinosaurs. “Dinney time, Quinner. Let’s get the others.”

“Can we tell Austin and—?”

“I already told them.”

“I want to tell Austin and—!”

“Don’t whine, Quinny, I already told them. Let’s go tell Jo.”

She takes his hand and he trips along docilely. “You’re slobbering, Quinny.” She hasn’t got any paper. It’s all over his chin, what a mess. She takes him into the bathroom and washes him up. They go out the back door and across the drive to Jo’s trailer, a slope-shouldered aluminum hulk huddling sullenly in the weeds. Patches of blue light shift around the curtains. Blatter blatter. Through the door Saskia calls, “Jo?”

“What?”

(“Let me say it!” Quinny whispers.)

“What is it?” The blatter quiets.

(“Go ahead, go on,” Saskia urges.)

“It’s dinner, Jo!” Quinny trumpets, on tiptoes. “It’s time for dinner!”

“All right.”

“Let’s get Bill now,” Saskia says. She raps on the door of Bluffaroo Bill’s trailer. “Dinner!”

“I’m working!”

“Well it’s dinner all the same!”

Silence. Typical that he doesn’t answer, that he hasn’t even got the consideration. “So are you coming or what?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming! Christ!”

“He’s coming, he’s coming!” Saskia says to Quinny as they head back to the house. She and Marco have been practicing their impersonations. She assumes the retracted and pained expression of Bluffaroo’s eyes, the hunch of his shoulders, as if the damp-breathing face of the world were too close, its comradely arm too heavy. “Christ!”

“Not rawhole enough,” Marco says. “Look more persecuted.”

So here they all come, padding over the troughs and crests of the warped boards of the common room, into the dining room and around the two-ton oak table beneath the spidery brass chandelier with the fake candle-flame bulbs, half of which have been burned out for about a century now. Dinner is brown rice with toasted almonds, scallions, and raisins; fried eggplant with a garlic-potato sauce (an ancient Greek recipe); home-baked beans; a cuke salad with fresh tarragon, straight from the greenhouse. A tasty ribsticking meal for these short and cold Tylerian winter days. Saskia is by miles and miles—let’s face it, light-years—the best cook at White-on-the-Water.

Not that anybody notices. Only Lauren, seating herself calmly at the head, utters an automatic “Looks good.” The crew is too busy giggling and shoving. “Cut it out,” Saskia says. “Austin—”

“What?”

“Stop it.”

Gravely she sets the good things before them, generous with her provisions. Bill is jutting out his ultra-trimmed beard and looking around him like the whole world and everybody in it is a major letdown. That’s a habit of his. He probably keeps his beard ultra-trimmed because he’s trying to compensate for his body, which is “going to seed,” as they say. He has that sort of lard-butt body type that makes men look high-waisted and elbowy. “Boy, somebody’s hungry.”

He groans histrionically. “Could I please eat in peace?”

What did she say? “Gee, you’re pretty crabby today.”

“I’m just in the middle of something, I want to get back to it.” Fork fork. His arms are inflating even as Saskia watches.

“You ought to get more exercise.”

“Excuse me? Look who’s talking! That thing with all the glare up in the sky, that’s the sun, you know. In case you were wondering.” Hyuck hyuck. Fork fork.

“Bill, you’re going to choke on something,” Lauren says.

“Et tu, Brute?”

“Just slow down! You’re making me lose my appetite.”

“This is pretty good, Sas,” Bluffaroo says, food pouched in both cheeks. She hates it when he calls her Sas. He has never once called her Saskia. Must be too much work, getting all those syllables out. “Can I tell you, though.”

“No.”

“If you want to keep the eggplant from getting soggy, you need hotter oil.”

“They’re soggy because you piled twenty onto your plate at once, Pig of the Universe.” It’s true. Saskia’s three slices are perfectly crispy.

“You’re getting ruder every day,” Lauren says.

“What about him? I don’t insult his cooking!” Which, you may believe, is a token of amazing self-restraint. Whenever it’s Bluffaroo’s turn to cook, there isn’t a pot left east of the Mississippi without a black crust at the bottom. He’ll do something Bluffarooish like decide halfway through that maybe he should make his own gourmet doodah croutons for the salad. He tells everyone he’s making something that will bury the store-bought croutons under an avalanche of Bluffarooish superiority. But in the meantime, crushing herbs in the pestle, holding open his doodah gourmet cookbook with pudgy fingers, he forgets the casserole in the oven, and since his flesh-blob of a nose is apparently too small to smell anything, it’s always Lauren or Saskia who calls from the common room, or down from the second floor, “Is something burning?” Then he has to cook something else in a hurry, so dinner is doodah croutons and boiled soybean franks, and then Lauren has only five minutes to eat because she’s going to her waiting job down in Ithaca. She is so hard-working and all Bluffaroo has to do is make her dinner on time, and he screws it up.

So why do they let him cook? Lauren cites empowerment. He’s supposed to be learning by doing. But he isn’t getting better, Saskia says. You can bring that up during crit/self-crit, Lauren says. That’s another communal thing that Lauren tries to get going between Bill, Jo, Saskia, and herself. It’s always a disaster. Criticism: Bill, your cooking stinks. Self-criticism: Maybe I should be more patient about Bill’s lousy cooking.

“I’ve figured out how to get into that new section,” Bluffaroo is saying to Lauren. “I moved Sam’s jump into the gorge before the scene with Rudolph and the transvestite, so now I can open immediately with the discovery of Sam’s body under the Cayuga Street bridge. I’ve got to call the coroner, find out how much they bloat up. Sas, could you pass the salt?”

“You don’t need any more salt. Austin!”

“What?”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“I saw you do that.”

“You must have forgotten to salt the beans.”

“No, everything is salted exactly right.”

The patented eye roll. Lord, give him patience. “Please give me the salt.”

Saskia hands it to him. “It’s just going to make you even more uptight.”

“Say what?”

“It’ll raise your blood pressure.”

“Thanks, you do that just fine.” Hyuck hyuck.

Then there is Jo. She has already finished and is sitting quietly, stone-faced. Is she thinking about anything? Saskia tries to calculate the line of her gaze. She seems to be staring at a patch of table between Austin’s plate and Mim’s glass. If you waved your hand in front of her eyes, would she blink? Jo never eats much, and when she’s done she smokes. Not hemp even, but tobacco. She is thin and looks a lot older than she is, which is twenty-eight. She has a lower lip that sort of droops. She looks out of the side of her eyes at people, that lower lip drooping in wonder and dislike, as if to say, “Who the hell are you? Why don’t you drop dead?” Perhaps it’s an expression she learned for her job, as a cashier in one of Huge Red’s cafeterias. Austin can make a perfect Jo face. It’s basically his halibut face, without all the mouthing.

Sometimes Jo and Bluffaroo will team up. Bluffaroo will talk about the fifty-two ways the place could be fixed up and Jo will say Wouldn’t That Be Nice, with a snort that means it will happen when hell freezes over. The two of them look like circled wagons, defending themselves from the Native Americans. Eventually, though, one of them will decide to yank the rug out from under the other and go solo. “Why don’t you just do it yourself,” Jo will suddenly say, “instead of pissing and moaning?” Saskia wishes Lauren would say: “You don’t like it here? Fine. Live somewhere else.” It’s not like they pay rent or anything. But Lauren sits through it all calmly, ignoring them as though they were children. And she tells Saskia not to be a martyr.

“Thanks for dinner,” Jo says to no one in particular and heads back somnambulently to the blue light. Yes, master. Bill smears a napkin around his lips. “Merci pour zee meal, ma’amzelle.”

He’s smiling. This must be a little joke. The stubble at the edges of his beard twitches. “Try not to be such a jerk,” Saskia says.

Lauren sighs. “Sometimes I feel like throttling both of you.”

The crew is straining to bolt, and Saskia releases them even though none of the plates are empty, and Shannon’s is nearly full. They stampede toward the stairs, Austin leading: “Last one up is a turdbucket!” Saskia regards the puddled food dejectedly. Sometimes she just doesn’t have the energy. Quinny has remained behind. Obviously, the turdbucket. “Guess what?” he says to Lauren. He has such a high voice. They say boy sopranos turn into basses. Hard to imagine.

Lauren was about to get up. “What?” Quinny hesitates, blank-faced. “Well, what?” Lauren never has enough patience with Quinny. You’d think she’d know better.

Quinny leans close. He cups his hands and whispers confidentially, “I told Jo to come to dinner!”

Lauren pats his head. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Saskia is cleaning up. “Why don’t I help,” Lauren says.

“No, it’s my turn.” That’s the system. You clean up after your own dinner.

“You’ve been a martyr all week,” Lauren says coolly, knowing just where the sore spot is.

But it’s self-protection, Saskia pleads silently. If we cleaned up after each other, everyone would be in the kitchen all night after a Bluffaroo fest, scouring lava out of pans. I’m not a martyr, I’m not. Lauren has done her disappearing act. Some communal dinner, Saskia thinks, tipping scraps into the compost bucket. A real mess. Ha ha ha.

2

I was born twelve summers ago, on the Fourth of July. It was said by the people of Wonderland that the loud noises occasioned by the explosives the Novamundians take childlike pleasure in setting off in traditional celebration of their National Day caused beautiful young Lauren, who was big with child, to go into labor. Wonderland was in an uproar, and hemp had dulled the wits of those whom Lauren needed. Only resourceful Thomas acted quickly. He bundled groaning Lauren into Betsy and raced up the rough dirt roads.

Betsy is a Ford pickup, vintage 1965, a good year. Back in the commune days she was psychedelic, with a rainbow across her hood, doves and paisleys in attendance, and the word “Wondermobile” in balloon letters on her sides. She was indeed a wonder to look at, aglow in the Ithacan sunlight, but Tylerian townies would break her side mirror or let air out of her tires. After Thomas and the guru left, and the commune withered away, she was repainted. Saskia cried at first to see her disappearing under swaths of tomato red, but eventually she conceded that Betsy looked dignified in one color. A lady. Betsy was older now, and it was right and proper for her to have put away childish things. Now she is lamed with a bad hip that makes her list to the right, and toothy with rust from years of splashing through road salt. Her headlights look upon the muddy roads and smelly ditches of this bedraggled world with a tolerant, long-suffering expression. Surely she has seen everything by now. Twice, probably.

Eager for knowledge, I was determined to come out on the back seat and see what the fuss was about. Thomas coaxed Betsy to ever greater exertions. She flew the last mile, taking short cuts across meadows and streams. Amazed witnesses later said they had never seen a truck so nimble.

Thomas took good care of Betsy, washing her and tuning her up, listening to every knock and clatter. Now she drives best for Lauren and Saskia, Lauren coaxing gently on pedal and stick, Saskia patting the dashboard. Bluffaroo is rough, and Betsy tries to buck him out of the cab. She hates Jo so much she stops in the middle of the nearest intersection and floods.

When Betsy screeched to a halt at the hospital, Lauren was holding me on her stomach and I was looking curiously out the window. The doctors ran out and stood around us, astounded. There was nothing for them to do but cut our cord and give me a bath. I was a small babe, weighing only four pounds, but healthy and vital withal. I stayed in the hospital for a week. Of this period I remember little.

I got my Novamundian surname from Lauren. Thomas chose “Saskia.” Thomas had a great love for the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn, and Rembrandt’s wife was named Saskia. Nobody except Thomas and Rembrandt knows what Saskia means!

Names are fraught with meaning. Lauren is so named because of laurel, the beautiful tree that honors men with her touch on their crowns, as Lauren deigns to kiss her shorter boyfriends’ heads. “Bill” brings “bilious” to mind, and “belly.” “Thomas” makes her think of “tomcat.” But he had a dog. Etymologically, anyway, “Thomas” means “twin.” Significance?

And what about “Saskia”? Being mysterious is nice, but only if you yourself know the secret. Does “Saskia” mean “secret”? Lauren swears up and down she doesn’t know. It was Lauren who told Saskia about Thomas’s love of Rembrandt, after Saskia had been pestering her for information. Saskia found a book about Rembrandt in the great Ithacan library. It had nothing in the text about the meaning of “Saskia,” but there were some nice portraits of people in dark rooms lit by embers. The person standing for the portrait could simply take one step back and they would be swallowed up in the gloom. Now you see me, now you

Rembrandt would look up from his easel and say angrily, “Will you stop fooling around?”

Thomas, of course, is not Novamundian but Phaiakian. The Phaiakians are “the people of the long oar,” great seafarers, near the gods in origin. Thomas is blond with wine-blue eyes. The word “Phaiakians” means “The Shining Ones.”

Saskia puts down her autobiography and looks for the millionth time at the map of Phaiakia that hangs over her bed: two large islands amid a cloud of smaller ones, and largest of all, a peninsula jutting north, curving eastward like a green mitten with fingers and thumb gently grasping the sea. You can tell it is a wise and good land merely from the cradling shape of it, a land fit for its people. One of the astronomers profiled in her star book was a Phaiakian. He lived in a castle on a green island and looked out of a tower and discovered more stars than any man before him. Near the gods.

She turns off the bedside lamp. In the blackness of predawn, her own stars are like a Rembrandt painting, and like Thomas, too. The Wagon (which farmers call the Plow, for the circle of the seasons and the work that never ceases), the supernova in Boötes, the eternally waxing Moon: their reassuring glow keeps her company for a while, but then fades away into the dark.

3

After some experimentation, the two girls discover that they are the same height only when Saskia stands on her toes on two textbooks on a stairstep above Jane. “How tall are you?” Jane asks, so openly marveling that it’s a darn good thing Saskia isn’t sensitive about her height.

“That’s classified information.” Saskia has not gotten taller by a nanometer in two years. All of her growth vectors are horizontal. This explains why, for all their difference in height, Jane weighs only five pounds more than Saskia. Saskia’s breasts are ballast, like the balloonist’s bags filled with sand. If she could only cut the rope and sling them off, yelling “Bombs away!”

Jane Sing is double-jointed all over. Where other people put hands on their hips, she turns her wrists impossibly and seats them in the middle of her back. She curls one leg several times around the other and collapses her ankles outward so that she’s standing on the sides of her feet. Everything about her is vertical: she pushes up the metal bracelets on her arms, they slide back down. Through the long drop from ears to shoulders dangle earrings that jiggle and flash like aspen leaves. And her hair! She has a way of tilting her head when she talks that causes the long black curtain to tassel forward over her shoulders. She throws each side back by dropping a shoulder and sweeping the hair with a flick of her wrist and a toss of her head, pursing her lips in a way that means, “You might be dying of jealousy, but really it’s rather a nuisance having such long hair.”

She lived in Boston for two years, and before that in England. The Blatt’s Indian hypothesis is true to the extent that her parents were born in a town that used to be in India, although now it’s in Pakistan. England apparently explains the smooth-sided cedar-box voice. “You’ve never heard an English accent before?”

Saskia hangs her head. Small-town barn. “I’ve read English books,” she offers. The Captain speaks with a smooth-sided voice? That cannot be right. Perhaps his years at sea roughened it. The salt air corroded his cedar box. The Captain definitely has a gravelly voice. That is why he harrumphs all the time, to rearrange the gravel and have time to ponder, ponder.

Jane is already thirteen, which, of course, is exciting. But Saskia actually kind of likes being twelve. Twelve is a practical number, graciously divisible, a tool kit. Math would be an even more wonderful discipline if we had two extra fingers so that we counted in base twelve. Thirteen, on the other hand, is a prime number. Primes are intractable. You can’t mess with them, they go their own ways. Secretly, Saskia worries about turning thirteen this summer. If she has got mooniness and breasts already, what will happen when she’s a teenager? God, she’ll get moony every other day, her breasts will balloon into medicine balls.

Since Jane turned thirteen last September, why isn’t she in the next grade?

It’s a sore subject. “I’ve been moved around so much, I got behind,” Jane says crossly. During those years in England, she went to half a dozen different schools. “I would get fed up with one and have to try another.”

Saskia understands the feeling, but she never knew you could switch schools. She thought schools were like obnoxious households: they were simply the beds you had to lie in. “How many different schools did your town have?”

She can tell from Jane’s face that it’s a dumb question. “These were boarding schools.”

Perhaps because Jane is older, she smokes cigarettes. She sneaks four or five a day in a stall in the opium den, just like the tough pigs. In class she chews on the ends of her ballpoint pens or sucks on her hair. “I’m oral,” she tells Saskia.

“It’s really not good for you,” Saskia offers hesitantly, meaning the smoking, and not knowing if that’s a barnish thing to say or even more folksen than smoking.

Jane is not scornful. She actually seems to take Saskia’s opinions seriously. “I know. But I’m hooked. I’m terrible!” At least she is not as hooked as Jo, for whom the butt is as permanent a part of her face as her mouth is. Saskia has imagined that if you slid the cigarette out from between Jo’s lips, it would turn out to be a cotter pin and Jo’s jaw would fall off. Jane has also smoked hemp, as she has casually mentioned a couple of times. Fortunately, none of that has materialized yet in Saskia’s presence. Let’s face it, hemp makes you kind of stupid. Lauren and Bluffaroo pass a joint around sometimes after dinner, and the next thing you know they’re giggling because one of them knocked a glass over, hyuck hyuck.

But the first time Jane comes to White-on-the-Water is right after school, so Lauren is in her plant-master mode. Saskia is proud of her as she turns, tall, capable, from the stretch and bend of aphid spraying (naturally, something natural, a vegetable soap), to say hello. Bluffaroo and Jo are nowhere to be seen. “Both trailers are off limits,” Saskia explains. “Major leprosy colonies.” The soap dissolves the soft-bodied aphids, like sulfuric acid.

Saskia brings down Lauren’s sewing basket, and out of it come bolts of brilliant damask, sumptuous brocade, cloth-of-gold. The bolts are laid out on the kitchen’s scarred wooden table and arranged in a manner pleasing to the eye. The spice jars in the rack over the stove yield galingale, spikenard, cubeb. The clamor of the market—the sellers hawking wares, the caged chickens squawking, the wooden wheels rumbling over the stones—is nearly deafening. A score of languages are spoken within earshot, every color of skin can be seen. The Wanderer herself is a striking pale gold. She reads off the words chalked on the shoulders of the jugs beneath a table: “Date wine. Rice wine. Ai, and palm wine, too!” She rocks out the stained bung and breathes deeply of the heady fumes. “I haven’t had so much as a horn of decent palm wine in months!”

It has been a long journey for the Wanderer, from Kubilai Khan’s capital through jungles and deserts, from one wretched village to the next. But here at last is a fine town, bustling with sellers of rich goods in every street. The Wanderer lingers in the striped shade of this awning because the merchant is comely, with a lively eye. Judging from her duskiness, this town must be south of Cathay. Ai, but it is good to look upon such a maiden after so many months of sleeping under the stars, wrapped in one’s cloak against the mountain frost!

“As-salaam aleikum,” the maiden says, bowing her head gracefully.

The Saracen tongue? The maiden must be a worshiper of Mahomet. But not wearing the veil. A tart? Curiouser and curiouser. “Aleikum as-salaam,” the Wanderer responds.

The merchant maiden continues in the trade language of the area. “I think you’ll find these cloths to be of very high quality, sir.” Where has this golden Wanderer come from, the dark maid must be wondering. What lonely roads has she walked and what evil things seen? The pain of the world is in her eyes. Alas, it is the lot of the Wanderer to leave a trail of broken hearts.

With a connoisseur’s touch, she runs her fingers over the cloths. She slides the silk tinglingly along her arms. She rubs the coarse buckram against her cheeks. “Mmm. That’s fine fustian.” The ripple of twill, the ridge of wale, the tickling grassy yield of nap. Soon the merchant maid is picking up the bolts after the Wanderer and holding them to her own cheeks.

“And what might you be buying, good sir?” the maiden asks at length.

“Some of everything, perhaps.” The Wanderer smiles charmingly. “Or nothing, perhaps. I might buy you out, or I might leave you with all your goods and not a bezant of mine.” One must keep them guessing or they will steal you blind. Marco taught her that.

The maiden’s eyes flash—a fiery one!—as she counters, slim dark arms on hips, “You’ll find no better wares than these in all of Arianmariandishdashdale.”

The Wanderer falters. Arian—? She pushes away the thought that it is an improbable name. Southern India, perhaps. Some of the names there are absurdly long. But the people of India go naked, and this maiden, alas, is modestly attired. “I meant no offense.” What are a few bezants compared with such beauty? “On my soul, I will buy it all!” If Marco were here he would be bouncing a palm off his forehead and bellowing, “Stop! Stop!” Marco is a trader first, a practical man, ever despairing of his impetuous disciple. “My name is Aiyaruk. What is yours, pray?” The dark maiden hesitates. “You do not trust me with it?”

“I’m thinking. My name is Al-Embroidia Al-Fastansia Al-Maram-mjibwa!”

Well! Quite a name. Aiyaruk must admit it is impressive. But perhaps too impressive. Perhaps it is rather pretentious, non?

The maiden rushes on, “And I am the daughter of the queen!”

“No you’re not.” There are no queens in the Khan’s empire. Everyone knows that.

“I am too. You must obey me.”

Things have taken a wholly improper turn. Aiyaruk draws herself to her full height: “I am a disciple of the far-famed Marco Polo. I obey no one but my master.” The maiden also draws herself up, and Aiyaruk finds herself farther below than ever. Unfair to take advantage of Aiyaruk’s size! Uncalled for! Aiyaruk’s voice drips with sarcasm: “And anyway, what is the daughter of the queen doing selling wares in the streets of Arianmarianwhatever?”

“I’m standing in for my slave. He had to go to the bathroom.”

A brazen lie! And yet . . . there has been a slave underfoot for the last minute or so. Insolently fingering the bolts of cloth and asking impudent questions, he looks an unhealthy young dreg, besnotted and beslobbered. “This must be your slave,” she exclaims, grabbing the boy roughly by the arm.

“Yes, that’s him. Hand him over.”

“The daughter of the queen, and all you can afford is this disgusting thing?” The slave is whining. Aiyaruk boxes his ears and he runs away wailing.

“That wasn’t really my slave,” the maiden says haughtily. “My slave is still in the bathroom.”

Aiyaruk sniffs. “You’re just embarrassed to admit it.”

“Why is Quinny so upset?”

Lauren is standing in the doorway, a hand cupping the head pressed gooily into her hip. Saskia and Jane trade a glance. They understand each other without a word or a wink. “I don’t know,” Saskia says, puzzled.

“I don’t either,” adds Jane. They shrug.

Lauren is exasperated. “I don’t understand half the time what his problem is. I want you to include him in what you’re doing, Saskia. You’re good with him.”

“Sure.”

“You’re a good girl.”

Saskia winces. “As-salaam yoorwelkum.”

“Hm?”

“Never mind.”

“Well excuse me, Miss Temper.”

Go stick your head in the compost heap. “Come here, Quinny.” He transfers his clutch readily to her. He never blames anyone, he only wails for comfort and accepts it from any quarter. Saskia will be nice to him for a while.

“You girls will have to get this stuff off the table,” Lauren says. “Dinner will be early. I’m working down at the café tonight.”

“Yeah, yeah, OK.”

Lauren heads out to the greenhouse. Jo calls this “mowing the grass for dinner,” and breaks into her wheezing laugh. Jane offers a handful of cubebs to Quinny, assuring him they’re sweet. He spits them out, coughing and sneezing. “As-salaam howdyoulikem?” Jane asks, and she and Saskia have a very nice laugh together.

4

Lauren works hard. Spring, summer, and fall she’s at it all day in the field and greenhouse. In winter she still has the greenhouse, and her waiting job in Ithaca, and at the winter solstice there are the Scotch pines to cut and sell on top of everything else. “You get the whole summer off from school,” she says to Saskia. “What about me?” Saskia hangs her head. “I need some time for myself.”

That’s only fair. After dinner she disappears up to her room to meditate, and after meditating she climbs into her brass bed—as high as a table, as wide as the barn door, as massive and firm as Earth herself—and reads, mostly books about meditation. “I am at the beginning of the greatest journey,” she has said to Saskia. “I am only now learning what it is I truly want.”

In the ample bosom of that brass bed she sleeps soundly. She never wakes when Mim has a nightmare or Quinny starts blubbering and has to be taken to the bathroom. The bed was the first piece of furniture Lauren and Thomas bought for the house, Lauren said. They found it at an estate sale for a dead giant, and it took six men to lift it into Betsy. They had to take out the door frame to get the bed into the bedroom. Then they didn’t put pads underneath it, and over the years the feet dug deeply into the softwood planks.

Once every couple of months Lauren goes to a meditation retreat for three or four days and that is when Saskia really appreciates how hard she works the rest of the time, because Saskia is almost run off her feet following the farming instructions she leaves behind. The astrology group meetings aren’t as bad, because they last only a day. The members get together on a farm on the next lake over, to cast horoscopes, or something like that, and talk about their swami, who died two years ago. This is not Truth, the Godhead guru, but someone later, named Baba Yogi. Lauren has his picture by her bed: he looks pretty gentle, actually kind of simple-minded, with milk-blue eyes and a triangle of white hair on his lower lip. Saskia never saw him in real life. She couldn’t go to the astrology group because she had the crew to take care of. The group is now publishing eight volumes of aphorisms that the leader left behind, scribbled on little pieces of paper. Lauren says they are gentle and profound and above all playful, in a saintly, all-knowing, bodhisattva-ish way.

When Lauren is reading in bed instead of meditating it’s all right to come in and say good night. Saskia loves the way she looks at these moments, so hoogily in a cone of lamplight, her ton of hair unbound, her pillows piled around her. She has a wide face with almond eyes and cheeks so well defined they look glued on. It’s not a mobile face. In fact it’s rather mask-like, which is why you have to be so careful with her. Whether that mask is inborn or learned Saskia doesn’t know, she has no other relatives to compare it with. Lauren never talks about her family. It’s as though she never had one, as though she sprang out of someone’s head fully formed.

Her reading glasses are as big and round as two full Moons, and the eyes behind each seem as calm as the Sea of Tranquillity. The book she is holding might be Being Peace or Be Here Now. Saskia will linger at the door, and Lauren will look up and slowly, deliberately close the book on a finger and lower it to her lap. In the evening after meditating or for days after a retreat Lauren does everything this way, one thing at a time, with a concentration so steady and slow it seems to ooze from her like molasses to coat the object of her attention.

It often seems that Lauren’s present is not instantaneous but infinite, leaving no room for past or future. Years ago there was a pendulum wall clock in the kitchen with an uneven tick that sounded like a peg-legged captain limping. When Lauren first looked at it each morning, she would reach up and move the minute hand backward or forward five, ten minutes. That was Lauren’s power, young Saskia imagined: the very fabric of time slid tinglingly past faster or slower as Lauren oozed faster or slower along the infinite line of her present. The clock had to be adjusted to fit the day Lauren was making.

Sometimes after Lauren lowers her book and gazes at Saskia, instead of saying good night she will ask if Saskia wants to brush her hair. Mim’s hair is thick, burnt umber, pert, hey-you-guys hair. Jane’s hair is elegant, gleaming, ruler-straight, obsidian. But Lauren’s hair, one must concede, sweeps all before it. As long as Jane’s, as bushy as Mim’s, and of a color indescribable even for Saskia, who knows all the color words. It might crudely be called auburn, but it has claims on copper and bronze and a faintly pink rust, and it hints in some lights at things more exotic, like cinnabar and peach. When you sink your hand into it you imagine you will draw it back out swirled in hues like an Easter egg.

Lauren puts down her book, rises regally from her brass bed to put on an Indian robe and settle into a chair. She gathers the mass like a pile of autumn leaves and deposits it in back, where it hangs almost to the floor. A tapestry of hair, before which you ought to bow down and worship. The first touch! It feels like wool, like a light electric current. Saskia pats it down and it bounces back, she clumps it in her hands, she fluffs it, she runs her hands through it, her fingers parted like fork tines. She reaches in deeper, finds her way elbow-deep to Lauren’s large head and massages her scalp and temples. Lauren sighs. “Why don’t we do this every night?” Why don’t they? Only Lauren can answer that.

Lauren’s hairbrush fits coolly into Saskia’s hand. She brushes back from Lauren’s forehead. Lauren says, “Harder.” As Saskia brushes farther back she steps away from the chair and lifts the hair so that it becomes a costly fabric on a loom that Saskia must stretch herself across. Fine silver threads are woven into it. Lauren wants Saskia to pull them out. The hair grows silkier in her hands, a deep shine developing. “You’re strong,” Lauren says. Saskia proudly brushes harder.

When Lauren climbs back into bed, Saskia would like nothing better than to climb in with her. Not to be with Lauren—that would be babyish—but to swaddle herself in that buffed, miraculous hair, wind herself in it like a caterpillar in its cocoon. She might wake up a butterfly. They say good night. Lauren turns out her light and falls into the dreamless sleep of the well-brushed.

How painful to compare Saskia’s hair! Its color is also indescribable. It was once your garden-variety blond, nothing to write home about, but respectable. Then, around the time the mushy pink blobs came, it began to darken, the way cheap varnish darkens and clouds. Saskia ruefully calls it “blondish.”

“Reminiscent of blond,” Jane says kindly.

“An allusion to blond,” Saskia says.

“Blondesque,” Jane says, inspired.

But the color is the least of her problems. It has of course not escaped Saskia’s notice in her wide reading that heroines—that is, genuinely intelligent, valiant, resourceful ones like Joan of Arc, not repulsive, sickly sweet, goody two-shoes ones like Little Dorrit—are few and far between. And among the few that exist, one trait is constant. They might be tall or short, beautiful or plain, but they always have thick hair. Thick hair is the mark of character, of spunk. It is the enhancement of beauty, or the solid compensation for plainness. What can it mean when you are both plain and thin-haired? Will you never be the heroine of your own story?

Lauren has two friends. One of them heads another ex-commune, with a water hole everyone goes swimming in during the summer. The other is a dancer and teaches at an alternative school in sunny Ithaca. All three of them are tall and beautiful. They form an equilateral triangle: perfect, no weak spots. All three have abundant hair, the ticket into the club. Lauren braids her hair into a rope that would dock an ocean liner, and the three of them stride out, laughing, for an evening on the town. Men drool after them slavishly. Goddesses, with goddesses’ rights, they use men according to their pleasure. “Chew ’em up,” Saskia says. “And spit ’em out!” Jane crows.

Saskia locks herself in the bathroom and drapes a towel over her wispy blondesque head. Studying herself in the mirror, saying, “Oh yes blah blah blah,” she practices ducking her forehead to make the ends of the towel slip forward over her shoulders, then flipping the two ends back with a nonchalant motion of her hands. It feels so good she could cry.

5

Thus am I half Phaiakian and half Novamundian: a daughter of both worlds, belonging in neither. The ways of the Novamundians seem dull and crude to me and yet I would not be at home in Phaiakia, either, because I do not speak Phaiakian. Thomas spoke Phaiakian to me when I was young, and I knew it and spoke to him in it, but I remember it no longer. I remember only that the words were gentle and soft and of a rare beauty.

Liquid sounds that floated in the middle of the mouth, not deigning to touch brute teeth, tongue, or lips. There were words that dissolved in the air like mist, words that gurgled like water going down a drain. The sentences tipped back and forth like wavelets, rocking you to sleep. A sea language.

Phaiakian has somehow faded away from Saskia, leaving behind an outline of a memory of a feeling about them, a hollow glow indicating something that she once held and carelessly lost. She once read a fantasy book in which there was talk of an Old Speech, a magical language that had been forgotten for eons by the race of men. In this Old Speech, all things had been called by their True Names, and if one knew the True Name of a thing, then one knew the thing itself, one knew its nature. Bits of the Old Speech were remembered by certain wizards, wise and good men. Saskia hopes someday to find the Master who will not teach her so much as remind her of what she once has known, who will lead her back to her true lost self.

Whenever the Saskiad is sung by the bard in the feasting halls, it is interrupted at this point by the listeners, who demand to know: How did Thomas the Phaiakian meet Lauren the Novamundian?

Therefore will I explain: When Lauren was just entering folksenhood, she came as a disciple to Huge Red, the famed citadel of higher learning that looks down from its promontory onto sunny Ithaca. She sat at the feet of the Masters and learned many things: she read the Great Books and learned the esoteric Greek System. She was quick, a delight to her Masters, and was soon to be awarded the cap and the Latin scroll that signifies an Adept.

Baccalaurei in Artibus. Ars Magisterium. Words of grandeur and power. But thanks to Tyler Junior, Saskia has only a smattering of Latin. The languages taught at Junior are Spanish (Ms. Birnbaum) and French (Mr. Hooper). In other words, none of the important languages, like Latin, Greek, Phaiakian, Mongol, Turkish, or Persian. Saskia was going to take Spanish, since the Captain is fluent in it (he was a Spanish prisoner of war for two years), but at the time when she had to make the final decision he happened to be a fugitive in Boney’s France—a wonderful adventure in which he was hidden in a Loire château by a French nobleman with a très belle daughter-in-law, who of course fell in love with him, as any woman must. And so the Captain was learning French, and it seemed appropriate that his Lieutenant would learn it with him. Unfortunately, the Captain became fluent within thirty pages, leaving his Lieutenant behind, and the très belle daughter-in-law, in the person of Mim, seemed to know no French at all. But it was too late: Saskia was stuck reading crushingly boring schoolbook stuff about a couple of drips named Didier and Marie. Monsieur Oopair is a rabbity man with red-rimmed pop eyes and halitosis who picks the remains of his breakfast out of his beard, examining each particle and then eating it. Dégoûtant!

Only Jane has kept the situation from being a total loss by taking French herself. Not that she is in Saskia’s class. Jane already had two years of French in merry olde England, so she’s with the ninth graders and still better than anybody else. She has a lovely French accent. The French nobleman’s daughter-in-law is now chocolate-colored, and the Captain could not be more pleased.

Jane was taught Latin in England, too.

“It’s not fair!” Saskia wailed.

“Shit, I hated Latin,” Jane said. “What good is it to anybody? All I can remember is semper ubi sub ubi.”

“That’s what the pope’s speech is called, right?”

“I don’t think so. It means, ‘Always wear underwear.’”

But those were troubled times. Novamundus was at war. The disciples knew it was an unjust war, but no one would listen to them!

A great battle between the disciples and the Ithacan centurions swept Huge Red. Lauren was captain of a brigade of disciples. When she lost a bloody skirmish—a valiant rearguard action involving swordplay on a footbridge suspended dizzyingly above a gorge—the centurions exiled her from Huge Red. The only choice left to her was to join the colony of Novamundian exiles in India, a land in the East famed for the wisdom of its Masters.

After much wandering through deserts and jungles, over mountains and across mighty rivers, the exile Lauren came at last to the court of the wisest Master of all wide India and found her rightful place at his feet. Soon Lauren was his favorite disciple.

Then it came to pass with the passing of days that a new disciple knocked at the gate of the court of the wisest Master of all wide India. He had eyes of the clearest blue and hair like the sand of the Phaiakian dunes. He was a seafarer, an adventurer, a man who had traveled much in the realms of gold, and he had come at last to learn the Wisdom of men who knew nothing of the sea, who ate not their food with salt, nor knew of ships. His shield was azure, oar upright, or. He carried that oar on his muscled shoulder and the gatekeeper of the court of the Master asked, “Why do you carry on your shoulder a winnowing fan?”

He planted his oar in the Earth and said, “I have found my resting place.”

Thus it was that Thomas the Phaiakian entered the court of the Master. And thus it was that there he found his home in Lauren, who is not a traveler nor a seafarer, but a woman of the earth, a tiller of the soil. And they did love each other in the court of the Master amid great rejoicing, and she did return from her exile, bringing Thomas with her to Wonderland, as the prophecies had foretold. And so loved were Thomas and Lauren by their Master, the wisest of all Masters in all wide India, famed for the wisdom of its Masters, that the Master came to Novamundus with the young couple and lived also at Wonderland as their guru, Truth, and took only them and their circle as his disciples.

6

“So wait a minute,” Jane says, bemusedly tracing the pink floral pattern on her bedroom wallpaper with a sepia finger. “Who are Mim’s parents, then?”

“Jo is her moor, too.” Saskia is lying on Jane’s bed. The tufts of the white bedspread are deliciously nubbly against her arms.

“But that makes Jo everybody’s mother.”

“That’s the whole problem. Mim was the first. When Jo got pregnant with her, she was only seventeen and the far was some guy named Mack or Mick or Max who was only eighteen and they had to get married.”

Jane flops over onto her stomach and grimaces down at Saskia, her hair forming a tent around the two of them. “That old story! How depressing!”

“This guy Mack or Max or whatever hadn’t finished high school and had some lousy job like garbage man or chimney sweep. They lived in someone’s attic and wore burlap sacks and ate cat food. Then the twins came along.” Saskia imagines the far, a greasy motorcycle dreg, looking through the glass in the maternity ward and counting his fingers, horror-stricken. “After that they were really poor. Lauren told me Mack or Mick had some sort of operation so they wouldn’t have any more kids.”

“He must have got his tubes tied.”

“Yeah, whatever. But they must have done it wrong, because Jo got pregnant again.”

Jane nods wisely. “That happens sometimes. And that one was Quinny?”

“Exactly. So Mack or Mick just took off. While Jo was pregnant. He couldn’t handle it.” Saskia sits up, emerging from the tent of Jane’s hair into her bright bedroom.

“He was history,” Jane says. Her narrow face is wedged between her hands, her legs are lifted from the knee, her bare feet happily tapping teaspoon ankles together.

“He was outta there,” Saskia says, admiring Jane.

“He said, ‘Eat my dust, Jo.’” The girls laugh.

Saskia wriggles around on the spread, feeling the nubbles under her bare arms and feet. “I guess it’s not so funny, though,” she adds, for form’s sake. “Lauren says Jo was desperate.”

“So Lauren took them in.”

“Yeah.”

“What a good person she is.”

“What a martyr.”

“I don’t blame Mack for taking off. Jo is such a sourpuss.”

“She smokes like a proverbial factory.”

“She looks almost retarded.”

“But how could Mack leave Mim? I mean, really! She’s so beautiful.”

“She is beautiful,” Jane confirms. Her hand is balled under her chin, a confirmatory pose.

“He must have been a schmuck,” Saskia says. That’s one of Bluf-faroo’s words, along with half-pint, small fry, hotshot. Saskia has been called them all.

“No wonder Austin and Shannon look like Jo,” Jane says.

The twins are tall for their age and gangling like Jo. They have her thin face and pointy chin, the same sidelong, hooded eyes. Quinny, on the other hand, is short and moon-faced. “I guess Quinny takes after Mack or Mick. And who knows where Mim came from. Maybe Jo found her in a rush basket in the river.”

“Ugly people often have beautiful children, and vice versa,” Jane observes. “Ever notice that?”

Like me, Saskia thinks. Is that what she means? Tall Lauren of the floor-length hair and muscular Thomas of the wine-blue eyes: they mate like gods and what do they get? A lizard. “Yeah, I guess.”

“So do any of them think of Jo as their mother?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“They all sleep in the big house.”

“That’s the way the commune used to work. The idea was the barns were all together and the folksens took care of them all together. It had something to do with Native Americans.”

“So Bill is Jo’s boyfriend?”

“No.”

“I thought they lived in the same trailer.”

“Bill lives in the one nearer the house.”

“How long has he been there?”

“A few months. A year, I guess.”

“So why is he there?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“But doesn’t he do anything?”

“He calls himself a writer. That’s what he’s supposedly doing in his trailer all day.”

“That’s cool! I’ve never met a writer before.”

“Bluffaroo isn’t a real writer. He’s always talking about some series of novels he’s supposedly working on. You’d think his trailer was the cave of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the way he carries on about staying out of it.” Bill refers to it as his Work. He says it like that: capitalized, lapidary. Saskia has his epitaph all figured out: A Jerk, He Worked. She can’t wait until it’s needed. “I just think it’s really pretentious to talk about writing a series of novels when I don’t think he’s even written the first one.” Something to do with making Ithaca into another Alexandria. Ithaca is Greek and Alexandria is Egyptian, stupido. Bluffaroo says it will be a “tetrahedron” of novels. What is a pyramid of novels? The pyramids aren’t even in Alexandria, stupido.

No one has ever seen anything by Bluffaroo except a few lousy haiku. He calls them “moment essences” and uses no capitals, not even for his name. (Hey Bluffaroo, I think it’s already been done.) He types them on little rectangles of special doodah green rag-paper he buys at an Ithacan art supply store and thumbtacks them to the bulletin board in the kitchen. He uses four tacks for each haiku and pile-drives them into the board so deep that only he, with his super-long fingernails, can pry them out again. Later, he remounts them on more special doodah rag-paper (blue) and sews them into numbered volumes which he puts in the common room on a shelf labeled “moment essences of william hobart owens.”

w.h.o.?

Here is Bluffaroo in the lyric vein:

nature is shameless

her clouds litter the skylake

silk veils flung away

Or:

harlequin moon bows

low, hat doffed, sly by the wings—

the last curtain call

Hunh?

“Actually, the books aren’t bad-looking,” Saskia says to Jane. “Pretty blues and greens, good sewing job. He missed his calling.”

Saskia once asked Bluffaroo to make a volume of her own haiku, which, let’s face it, are better, and he told her to make it herself. Then he tried to weasel into her good graces by saying he would show her, but when he read one of her haiku, you could see him struggling to make the connection: I am the haiku writer here. I didn’t write this. Haiku. Not by me. Haiku. Not by me. Does not compute. “That’s really quite good. May I suggest—”

“No, you can’t.”

“Look, if you want help, you can’t take that bratty tone.” She whipped out her bazooka-sized flamethrower and blasted his shelf of collected haiku, turning it into a glorious roaring sheet of flame reaching from floor to ceiling.

“There’s something just plain wrong with Bill,” Saskia says.

“You think so?” Jane asks.

“Don’t you think so?”

“Shit, I don’t know.”

“He pretends to be mellow, but actually he’s really tense. Haven’t you noticed that?”

“I only saw him for about a minute.”

“It’s like he’s telling himself, ‘Be mellow, Bill. Just be mellow now.’ But then he jumps down your throat. You didn’t notice that?”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s a little jumpy.”

“Exactly! Bluffaroo is exceptionally jumpy.”

“It’s a little spooky, in fact.”

“I just don’t like the cut of his jib.” As the Captain would say. Damme, the service doesn’t need men of his kidney! “He looks like the kind of guy who might go on a rampage.”

“You mean like the V.P.?”

“Worse. He’s probably got an enormous arsenal in his trailer and that’s why no one is allowed in. He’s not working on books at all, he’s taking apart and oiling an M-whatever or an AK-something-or-other and a so-and-so bolt-action repeater. One of these days he’ll kick open the door with an army boot and come out in camouflage gear, armed to the teeth, and he’ll shoot anything that moves. And afterward people will say, Gee, we didn’t really know him, he seemed mellow, he just stayed in his trailer all day.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Jane says. The two girls collaborate on a shocked silence. Jane’s hand is barely half an inch away from Saskia’s. Then Jane says, “Those trailers are so depressing. And all the junk in the yard makes the place look like one of those backwoods places in the movies where the couple from the city are afraid to go up to it after their car breaks down. A dog attacks them and the hicks on the porch just watch.”

“We don’t have a dog,” Saskia objects, a little hurt. But she can remember a dog at Wonderland, many years ago. A sleek, black and white bitch who ran so fluidly and fast she was like a swallow skimming over the meadows. She flushed birds, herded bugs with her nose, and flopped down like a dropped marionette when you scolded her, turning toward you a bright face with lolling tongue and eyes arched in innocent surprise. She was Thomas’s dog and she left with him. Saskia has always wanted to get another one, but Lauren has always refused. “You don’t want one.”

“No, you don’t want one.”

“You only think you want one.”

“No, you only think I only think I want one. You’re Lauren. I’m Saskia.”

“Don’t be obnoxious.”

Jane jumps up from the bed. “I need a cigarette in the worst way! Let’s go to the cemetery.” She pulls Saskia up. “If I smoke in here my mother has a conniption.” She goes into her closet and rummages among her shoes. “I even have to hide the pack because she fucking pokes around in here.” Jane shakes a pack down out of the toe of a cobalt pump. Smart hiding place, since Jane has about five hundred shoes. The girls put on their jackets, Jane slipping the pack into a pocket. “We’re going out!” she yells as they go through the front door. No answer. “We tried.” They head down the driveway.

“Jane!”

“Shit,” Jane says under her breath. “Don’t look back.”

Too late. Stupid Saskia has turned. Jane’s mother is beckoning from a window. “Jane!”

Jane whips around. “What?!”

“Where are you girls going?”

“I said we’re going out!”

“Where?”

“For a walk!”

“Well don’t be gone long, honey, I have to drive Saskia home soon.”

Jane turns and takes Saskia’s arm, propels her toward the street. “Christ, a fucking interrogation all the time.”

Saskia liked that “honey.” How pretty! Like honey-colored hair, which Saskia has always thought must be beautiful, although she has never seen it in real life.

They walk out of Tyler’s only suburban development and down the county road past the aqua water tower to what passes for the town center: gas station, greasy spoon, funeral home, four churches. (“My dad marveled at how much lower house prices were here than in Ithaca,” Jane said. “Has he figured out why yet?” Saskia said.) The cemetery is behind the oldest church, the one with the stubby Doric columns. The girls sit on the dead grass of the frozen ground behind an obelisk that is tilting because of some tree roots. It’s typical Tylerian weather, gloomy and cold, windy, not doing anything in particular at the moment but basically taunting, “I can rain, sleet, or snow anytime I want to, just remember that, scuz.” Saskia huddles. No wonder she never goes outside.

Jane has a cigarette in her mouth. With one hand she flicks open a pack of matches, folds one down, catches it under her thumb against the emery strip, snaps it. She ducks her head and grimaces as she cups the flame, then tosses her hair back and points her chin and the cigarette straight up as she puffs life into it.

“Ahh, that’s good,” she says. “That’s good.” Her long legs are drawn up, her knees under her chin. So lovely. “The first time I made out with a boy was in a cemetery.”

Saskia feels her face, despite the weather, getting hot.

7

Naked and limber, she stops on the stairs. A commotion is coming from the kitchen: shouts, squawks. She turns toward it, gliding down.

The sunlight is fierce. Merchants’ awnings stretch the length of the crowded street. Chickens and slaves run underfoot. This is her city, her home. She walks the streets, knowing the way. She greets old friends at every turn. “Aiyaruk!” they call out, delighted. “Where have you been?”

Today is the day on which the Khan’s emissaries come, and the city has turned out to greet them. She makes her way through the crush of bodies to the Square of Martyrs. The emissaries wear robes of white and sit astride white horses, splendidly caparisoned. They come only once a year, to choose the maidens who will be brought to the imperial city of Khan-balik. She stands among the others quietly, not pressing herself forward as some do, nor calling out shamelessly. She is wearing a jerkin of camlet, sturdy leathern boots, a belt of copper with an amber clasp.

The emissaries pass on their steeds, impassively reviewing the maidens. Then they catch sight of her. Startled, they murmur among themselves, stroking their long beards. The chief among them motions her forward. The crowd parts. He leans down as if to help her onto a horse. Ignoring his outstretched hand, she grasps the steed’s mane and vaults easily onto its back. The emissaries look at each other and nod. They ride out of the city.

This is the custom: each maiden has been judged, and awarded marks according to whether her features are well formed and in harmony with her person. Each has also been observed, to make sure that she sleeps sweetly without snoring, that she does not give off an unpleasant odor, that she is a virgin. (The last is tested with a robin’s egg and handkerchief, and virginal blood is known by this virtue: it will not wash out. The test is sure. Let this be a warning to the heedless young.)

Only maidens awarded ten marks are taken to Khan-balik. Some years, one or two are awarded eleven. There have been rumors of a twelve, every decade or so. Now the excited news flies forward from village to village, from signal fire to signal fire, reaching the imperial city long before the emissaries and their charges: among this year’s maidens is one who has been awarded thirteen marks.

In the great city of Khan-balik, in the Great Khan’s palace, in the antechamber to the bedroom of the Great Khan himself, she stands with five other maidens, and this is the custom: for the next three days and nights they will serve the Great Khan, ministering to all his needs. He will use them according to his pleasure. The other maidens are dressed in elaborate finery. They babble emptily among themselves. “Will he like me?” they ask each other. “Is my hair all right?” “Did you see blah blah last night, it was so funny!”

When the door to the bedroom opens, they rush in, each vying to reach the Khan’s bed first, and like a clutch of chicks they jump on it, while she stands off to the side. They hit each other with his pillows before settling down to a game of Truth or Death. Suddenly the Great Khan is standing by the door, splendidly attired in beaten gold. The five maidens run squealing to him. He carries them to the bed and puts them under the covers. He strokes and kisses them one by one, according to his pleasure. One by one they fall asleep.

Gazing at the sleeping maidens, the Great Khan heaves a deep sigh. He gets up from the bed and comes to her where she is standing. He looks at her for a long time. His robe of gold is a wonder to behold. He stretches out his hand and drops it on her shoulder. His voice is octaves deep, but kind, so kind: “So you are the maiden of whom I have heard so much.” She answers nothing. His hand is warm.

“Come,” he says, turning her toward the door. “I have much to show you.”

8

Jane’s bedroom is eerily tidy, even down to the furniture, all in white uniforms with gold trim, like admirals on parade. There is nothing on the walls but two framed pictures of French villages. Where are the drawings, banners, maps, mobiles, drums, weapons, star charts, periodic tables, medals of valor, coats of arms, cryptograms, scalps, totems, declarations, anathemas, emergency supplies for a long siege, clues to treasure buried elsewhere in the house?

“My parents don’t allow messes,” Jane says.

“So this is basically a motel room.”

Jane laughs. “Just show me where to check out!”

On the floor is carpeting, as pink and bushy as troll’s hair. Go out the door and it continues in royal blue down the hall and even covers the stairs like knee padding and goes on, kelly green, into the living room, spreading into all the corners, obsessively, the same way Saskia has to spread peanut butter on bread so that the crew won’t make a fuss. Outside, the house is canary. Two trees the size of coat racks rise, collared and guy-wired, from pitcher’s mounds of cedar chips, and around them nothing but more carpeting, winter beige, shorter than the troll’s hair indoors but spread just as obsessively into the corners. Beyond lies the street, in the middle of which a gargantuan mirror creates an amazing trompe l’oeil effect: one would almost believe that there really is another house and lawn across the street, identical in every detail to this one.

Everything in the Sing household works. Imagine! When you turn a knob on the stove, the gas poops on right away. Go ahead, flick any switch in the house: the lights light, the garbage disposal growls, the television’s mesmerant dragon eye sleepily bats its lid and focuses on you, glaring in its wakened rage. There is something exhilarating about this. Sing-things are dependable in a way Saskia never imagined possible. You don’t have to talk to them, praise them, pray to them to get them to behave.

But there is also something disconcerting about it, isn’t there? Everything at White-on-the-Water has personality. As the fan over the stove picks up speed, you have to edge the dial back or it will clatter against its cage and break a blade. The oven door closes so obediently only when it’s cold; as it warms, it slowly sneaks open until it’s furiously trying to bake the ceiling. That’s why there is a broom handle in the corner, in case you were wondering. You slide it through the handle on the oven door and wedge it in the radiator. Betsy’s passenger door opens only from the outside, but when you roll down the window to reach the handle you’d better push the glass down as you crank, or it will hang for a second before dropping with a screech of panic into the depths of the door, whence it can be extricated only by taking the panel off. These are the contracts between people and things. You respect things’ idiosyncracies and they, in turn, will faithfully work for you, in their own ways, year after year.

The Sings had an electric can opener—fascinating in itself, as it mumbled around cans like a chipmunk parting the seams of a peanut shell—and one day it woke up. Saskia was actually present at the moment of waking. The opener balked at the corners of a squarish can and disdainfully let it drop to the counter. “What’s wrong with this thing?” Mrs. Sing complained, rapping it on the head. After studying it, Saskia saw that it wanted, in fact, only the smallest encouragement: as each corner came under the blade she gently lifted the bottom of the can and around it went. So exciting, this sudden blossoming of self-awareness! And so little to ask, this scrap of attention from the people for whom the opener worked so hard! A few days later the can opener was gone, and a new one stood on the counter. Saskia was shocked. What comfortless world was this, unbound by contracts, populated by automatons?

At first surprised by Saskia’s outrage, Jane came to agree with her. The treatment of Sing-things matched anyway, she said, what had always “bugged the shit out of her” concerning her own position in the Sing house. “It’s like I don’t really exist,” she says, sitting on Saskia’s bed, a rumpled platform of sheets and blankets over plywood propped on cinder blocks. “As long as I’m not in some kind of trouble, they ignore me. It’s all Peter this, Peter that. It’s some Indian thing. The boy is a god, and the girl is nothing.”

Saskia saw Peter briefly at a meal. A tall dreg with a smooth face, pudgy around his thick-lipped mouth, he is lighter skinned than Jane, a beamer—a joy boy—whereas darker Jane broods. “My dad drives him wherever he wants to go, to look at buildings. He took two days off from work to go with him to some whizbang architect school he’s thinking about going to next year, whereas he would hardly even take a measly lunch break to go with me to court.”

“Court?”

“Some piddling thing about trespassing. Did you know that in India parents have to bribe suitors to take their daughters off their hands? What kind of fucked-up way of doing things is that? I think I’m worth a few camels.”

Mr. Sing is a meaty man, prosciutto-colored, with about ten pounds of beard. When Saskia first saw him, she thought he was recovering from two black eyes and only later realized that the alarming dark rings in the deep pits on either side of his nose were permanent. He will start a conversation with someone three rooms away by foghorning, “Jaa-AYN!,” “Pe-EETER!,” or “Smii-IITAA!” Everyone bends over backward to accommodate him. Mrs. Sing is bird-like. Her voice chirps tunefully, hopping around on the lightest and tiniest of feet. In profile her nose is almost a perfect quarter-circle, and Saskia finds herself staring at it, thinking of trigonometric functions.

“You get your color from your dad,” Saskia tells Jane. Saskia is intrigued by the world of family resemblances: the mix-and-match principle, the total-gene-dominance principle, the what-in-hell-happened principle. “But your basic build is like your mother’s. Especially your neck.” When Mrs. Sing chirps, her chin goes up and her head waggles on its long supple stalk in time with her music. “Whereas Peter has your mother’s color and your dad’s build.”

“Peter is going to be fat,” Jane says with profound satisfaction.

Alas, the Sings don’t wear those colorful togas the Wonderland communards used to bring back from India. Mr. Sing heads off to Huge Red’s Nutrition Department in a rumpled tweed suit and tie, an umbrella tucked fussily under his arm, and Mrs. Sing wears pantsuits. But the food is intriguingly odd. Mrs. Sing buys two-foot-long airy loaves of bread that are softer than pillows. The slices stick tenaciously to the roof of your mouth like rubber patches. Square and white, they seem woven, ripping straight one way but not the other. “How do they do that?” Saskia wonders out loud, tearing three slices in succession.

“Stop that,” Mrs. Sing warbles, lightly slapping Saskia’s hand. This, like the death-squad disappearing of the can opener, is a stunner. Lauren never touches Saskia.

Mrs. Sing’s corn is acrid, foot-smelling. Biscuits explode from a tube you whack on the head of the nearest long-suffering Sing-thing. At table, the girls tap the biscuits against their plates to make the weevils crawl out, until Mr. Sing growls at them to act their age. Saskia loves the TV dinners: everything tucked so hoogily into its little compartment, like spices on a merchant’s table. The most amazing thing is the rice, which is even whiter than the woven bread, as shiny as cartilage. “Are you full?” Mrs. Sing chirps at Saskia. How could she not be, from swallowing this packing material? In the kitchen Saskia sees the box, which promises “perfect rice, every time.” Is this Indian, then, this urge to control run wild? If so, it’s as exotic as Saskia could wish for.

9

At Wonderland, I was a happy child, running with the other children and excelling at games. My laugh was like a clear bell. In summer, I turned nut brown from the sun.

In case you don’t believe it, she has photographs: there she is, her naked brown little self, arm slung over the shoulder of another naked boy or girl, the two of them dirty, grinning insolently, staring up into the camera as if the snap of the shutter were no more than their due.

This was the Thomas Age of Wonderland, when the sun always shone and everything we put our hands to prospered.

She spreads the photos out on her cabin floor and stares at the myriad faces. She can remember a few names, a Blossom here, a Shiva there. Who are these children squatting with her in a fort in the tall timothy? Only the black and white puppy is familiar, bounding into the frame with bent ears poised like chopsticks.

People came and went, but Thomas and his dog, Lauren, the guru, and I were always there. We were the faithful.

All the faces are gone now, either one by one, taking tents or vans with them—how terribly mobile these people were!—or in the final mass exodus, when the guru came down from his tower amid the wailings of his people, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, the fire-blue flashes of pure Shakta energy. He left, urging all to accompany him, and Lauren came behind in righteous anger, dispersing those who lingered.

The guru is a confusing element. There is only one photo from the Wonderland period that includes him: a fuzzy dark shot of all the disciples crowded on the front porch. He is standing near the middle, an imposing figure, tall, pale, and bald. Yet a photo Lauren has from the court in India shows him as a slight, swarthy man. Since he knew how to change base metals into gold, perhaps like Proteus he could also change his appearance.

The fuzzy dark shot, by the way, also contains a rare glimpse of Thomas: as the favorite disciple, he is sitting next to the guru, wearing a brown robe, his beautiful hands forward on the arm rests of his chair, his light hair tousled. Those beautiful hands used to rest on Saskia’s blanket when he came in to kiss her good night.

Thomas worked in the garden with Lauren. He sailed in the bay, in a fine boat he made himself. He meditated with the guru and learned much wisdom from him.

After the guru ascended the tower, though he was still at Wonderland (now styled “Godhead”), we never saw him. Only Thomas went up, to take him his simple fare of brown rice. The guru sat alone and meditated for many months. Up in the tower the stars blazed so clearly, he could see every one, and he learned them all. When he had learned the last one, he came down from his tower and left us.

By then, Thomas, too, was gone. Why? How? All Lauren will say, her face closed down, is, “He had to go. He had no choice.”

It came to pass with the passing of days that Thomas’s time with us came to an end. He did not wish it thus. But when the call came, he was ready. He took up his oar and put it back onto his muscled shoulder and walked out through the gate of Godhead, whistling to his dog, who came running like the wind. He lifted the dog into the boat that he had made, raised a sail and dipped the oar, and the bow of the boat lifted and the wake creamed behind, and the boat disappeared up the lake. He did not turn to look back. Across the water of the lake, the dog howled until it could be heard no more.

Like the guru, the boat is problematical. Along one wall of the barn, almost lost in the tall weeds, an old wooden boat lies upside down. The mast is gone and the bottom staved in. Lauren has never volunteered anything to Saskia about the boat, and when Saskia asked, she said she couldn’t remember how it got there. Is it Thomas’s boat? If so, why is it in the weeds, when Thomas left in it? And if not, then whose boat is it?

Once or twice a year a postcard comes in the mail, with stamps from exotic lands, and Lauren reads the brief text and looks for a few long seconds at the picture on the other side before handing it curtly to Saskia, saying, “From Thomas.” Does she seem distracted as she returns to the bills? Saskia keeps the cards safe under her bed, in a box next to the photos. There are ten, dating as far back as six years ago, but she has a feeling some came before that, although Lauren denies having any. The latest arrived four months ago. Several of the pictures are of ports. One is a glacier. Another, a flock of crimson birds. No Rembrandts. Thomas’s handwriting is large and forceful, with looping g’s, p’s, y’s. The exclamation points are huge and flared at the top, like oars upright. He writes in English. The ten texts, in order, are:

1. Lauren and my Saskia: Although I haven’t written lately, I think of you often. I miss you both! Keep the faith. Love, Thomas.

2. A busy time, but I’m happy. Except of course that I miss you! Thomas.

3. Thomas is writing this, on a stormy day with high seas, cups rolling on the floor. He is sending his love to Lauren and Saskia.

4. Narrow scrape—brave men! I am well, and can feel that you are, too. Love Thomas.

5. Missing you! Thomas.

6. My Saskia and Lauren: I do think of you often. Please forgive my infrequent cards. I am fine, but very busy. I will write again soon, and at much greater length. Love, Thomas.

7. Thinking of you! Love, Thomas.

8. Missing you! Love, Thomas. p.s. Happy Birthday for my Saskia! I wish I were there to celebrate with you, but I am needed here. Much love, Thomas.

9. Missing you. Thomas.

10. Thinking of you! Thomas.

The last two do not say “love,” but neither do numbers two and five, so one may reasonably conclude that the omission does not mean anything. The obverse of number four is a photo of two men, neither of them Thomas, in a horseshoe-shaped inflatable boat in a rough swell, backed up against a wall of metal plates riveted together. They are flung around, hanging on tight. Something near them in the water is sending up a plume of spray. A sea monster? Angry Poseidon?

Thomas did once send a photo of himself. He is standing in his own boat, much bigger than the boat he had at Wonderland. The hood of his parka is down, his arms crossed. He is not smiling, but he seems filled with joy. His faithful black and white dog is by his legs. Unlike his master, the dog is smiling, eyes arched in innocent surprise. The bent ears have learned to stand up. The photo is turning orange.

Saskia pictures Thomas plying the seas in his Phaiakian boat. His dog has gray in her muzzle now, and if she had to run, she would be slower. He is steering with the oar in the water behind him. He sings Phaiakian folksongs in the dark of night while navigating by the stars, his voice the only sound on the flat sea. He is content, having no choice.

“What does he do now?” she asked Lauren.

“Something very important, I’m sure.”

“But what?”

“If he wants us to know, he’ll write about it.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“Truth and Baba Yogi taught us to let go of curiosity. It’s unhealthy, a striving.”

Saskia gave up.

After Thomas left, Saskia and Lauren were all alone. Lauren brooded, meditated, brooded. The farm went untouched for a year. The house would run out of food. Saskia remembers a period—two days? two weeks?—of mayonnaise sandwiches, mayonnaise on rice. Then Lauren started giving Saskia chores. Saskia was proud to be trusted. Soon Lauren was treating her like an equal. Lauren did her work, Saskia did hers. It was just the two of them in the big decaying farmhouse by the water. The tower, the dome, the huts were torn down, the wood burned in the wood stove. The trailers were desolate, like boats beached along the drive, breaking up in the surf. But this quiet, this solitude, was all right. There were books to read, left behind by long-gone communards, in corner shelves and closet tops and boxes under beds. The dry pages of the cheap paperbacks would split, powdering the air with the smell of graham crackers. The leather bindings of the old tomes would smear her hands with cinnamon powder, which she would dab on her forehead as a mark of wisdom. Reading, reading, Saskia let her skin lighten to yellow. The blond in her hair drained to the tips and dripped off, leaving mousy brown. The chunky muscles in her legs dissolved. Like a lizard, she stayed out of the sun.

Now when she lays out those old photographs and looks at, say, the circle of long-gone children squatting in the tall timothy, she picks out the insolent and dirty short one with the half-dome forehead and sees only a stranger among strangers.

10

When Jane gets permission for an overnight at White-on-the-Water, Saskia volunteers out of turn to cook the communal dinner. “Fire up the athanor!” she shouts. “Get down the crucibles! Let the transmutations begin!” Jane doesn’t know the first thing about cooking, but she is disarmingly cheerful, as usual, about admitting her ignorance. (I’ve got to learn how to do that, Saskia tells herself, never learning.) “That’s because at Sing Sing your moor does everything,” she says, backing her head out of a steam cloud. Outside in the village street the peasants see the steam pluming from the cellar windows and whisper, “The professor is at her experiments again!” They back away, crossing themselves. “This is called the Red Work,” Saskia explains, flushed from the heat. “If we were only making silver, it would be called the White Work. Cakes and cookies and so on. Do you know what the only edible stone is?”

“Sugar?”

“Salt.” She taps a shaker over the pot. “It just might be the Philosopher’s Stone.” After all, it goes into everything, and we know that the Philosopher’s Stone, though infinitely precious, lies everywhere, unrecognized. It is the Quintessence, summoned forth out of the spirits of mercury and sulfur, and in its turn it can spiritualize metals, generating that to which they aspire, l’essence de l’essence: gold.

One of the Disciplines of the Wise is the trance in which the essences of nature are not only perceived but felt, physically. Saskia will sit for an hour in the grass down by the shore, pondering a koan until she enters that space wherein silence and stillness press against her like solid walls. The heart of the Discipline is watching: delving with the reptilian eyes that don’t blink. One takes the tree in and it shimmers like liquid within, shedding its dross to become the Essence of Tree. By taking the world within yourself, you dissolve into the world. This, doubtless, is the culmination of that buttery feeling she summons when she undresses in her cabin and rubs herself against rough and smooth.

Of course the dinner is a resounding success, the murmurs of appreciation at the table so heartfelt one looks forward to them crescendoing after the dessert into a standing ovation, ecstatic cries of encore! calling the girls from the kitchen for bow after bow. But instead Bill mumbles, “Thanks much,” pats his midriff with a pale hand, and takes his hemp pouch out of his breast pocket. By the time Saskia and Jane have cleaned up—another novelty for Jane—the sounds from the dining room are a somnolent drone, borne into the kitchen on billows of sweetish air. And after the crew has been frogmarched through a toothbrushing and strapped into their beds for the night, the kitchen is a mess again. “Raided!” Saskia peeks into the dining room: “Hemp haze. Hard to see.” Bill and Lauren are nuzzling. Yugh.

Jane comes to look. She figured out a while ago that Bill was Lauren’s boyfriend. “Wow, they’re really going at it.” Saskia turns away. “Where’s Jo?”

“She doesn’t smoke hemp. She probably realizes she can’t afford the brain damage.” Jane is looking intently through the door. “Let’s go back upstairs,” Saskia says.

“In a sec.”

Saskia is certainly not going to clean up the mess. Lauren and Bill will leave it, too, and the food will dry and stick to the plates and they’ll have a hard time cleaning it tomorrow. Tough noogies. “They’re heading up,” Jane says, coming away from the door. She swivels her hips and smiles, twitching her eyebrows.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“God, Lauren is so beautiful. She could do better than Bill.”

“No kidding.”

“So are we going upstairs too?”

“I just remembered I have to check something in the barn. Let’s do that first.” Bill huffs and puffs so loud you can hear him all the way up on the top floor, it’s disgusting.

When they do go up a while later, all is safely quiet. Lauren is reading a book in bed. “Good night, Lauren!”

“Good night, girls. Sweet dreams.”

Up in Saskia’s room, Jane’s eyes are sparkling. “So what happened to Bill?”

“He must be back in his trailer.” Post-puff.

“She boots him? After they do it?”

“Lauren never lets him sleep up here, if that’s what you mean.”

“Wow!”

“Well would you? He probably twitches all night.” Think of that ultra-trimmed beard poking into you, those disgusting long fingernails. On second thought, Saskia doesn’t want to think about it. “Lauren hasn’t ever let any of her boyfriends sleep with her. She says she can’t sleep with someone else in her bed.” At least Kevin argued with her. Boy, the fights they had! Bluffaroo just takes whatever morsels are thrown to him.

“What an Amazon!”

“She is not!”

“No, I think it’s great!” Jane closes the door. “Now I want to get stoned.” She goes to her jean jacket where it’s hanging among the Tartar spears and takes out a pouch.

“You mean now?” Saskia squeaks. “Here?”

“I’m in the mood in the worst way.”

“I . . .” What can she say? “I’ve never done it before.”

“I figured that. It’s easy.” Jane dangles the pouch like a mouse held by its tail. “This is a nickel bag.”

“I know that.”

“All right, then.”

Saskia looks on in dread as Jane labors over her desk, shaking out shavings, pinching the paper into a groove and licking the edge with her felt-tipped tongue. She holds up a sliver almost as neat as the ones Bill makes, which are so uniformly neat they look like something you would buy in a Family Pak. “I don’t want to try it,” Saskia blurts out. She backpedals: “I mean . . .”

“Don’t worry,” Jane says, putting a match to it and puffing it into life. “There’s nothing to it.” She holds it out to Saskia. Saskia just stares at it. Jane has insisted it’s not moronizing, you just have to be inside it to see that. “Look, how do you know you don’t want to unless you try?”

Words of reason. Jane is so good to her, so patient. She puts up with all of Saskia’s barnish timidities, her slowpoking. How can Saskia disappoint her? “It makes you giggle,” Saskia says unhappily.

“If you don’t like it, just don’t do it again. It’s not like you don’t have a choice afterward.” Well, that’s true. Saskia prides herself on her willpower. “Come on, girl,” Jane says gently. She puffs again to make sure it is still lit and places it in Saskia’s hand.

Saskia’s heart aches at the thought of Jane’s goodness. Surely she would do anything to please Jane. Suddenly she wants to be enfolded in the long arms of this older, wiser girl. Jane would kiss the top of her head and smooth down her wispy hair. What Saskia fears most is becoming a different person, the way Odysseus’ men changed when they ate the honey-sweet lotus and forgot their way home; the way Lauren changes from the capable woman who keeps Bluffaroo in his place to the silly thing that nuzzles him and lets him scuttle into her bed. To change! That is not the way to be right-acting, to be trustworthy and constant such as one would never expect in a young person. You change, and you find you don’t fit your space anymore. Where would you be then but falling, forgotten?

One must have the constancy of things. When she was little, Saskia had a blue-jean book bag with an olive canvas strap. She took it with her into sunny Ithaca and filled it with books from the great library. It was a good book bag, capacious and sturdy. After a while it got a rip in the bottom and Saskia put it away, intending to mend it before she used it again, so the rip wouldn’t get bigger. But somehow—she was so young and thoughtless!—somehow she forgot about it. The book bag just went completely out of her head. For a couple of years she brought books home in a knapsack. And then one day, for no better reason than when she forgot, she remembered. It was such an old memory by then. Was it a true one? She remembered where she had put the book bag, but the place was in her own room. Surely it could not have lain there all that time, unnoticed. But she moved aside this and that, and there it was, exactly as she had left it, folded up, with the rip in the bottom. It had waited there patiently all that time for Saskia to come and fix it. Saskia had betrayed it, and yet it had waited for her. It didn’t even blame her. It was ready to be her book bag again, capacious and sturdy as ever. Holding it in her arms, she cried.

Funny. She is crying now, too. “I can’t,” she sobs miserably, holding the stupid thing in her lap. “I just can’t!”

Jane is silent. Saskia doesn’t dare look up at her. She can picture the disappointment and disgust in her eyes. God, she knew she would blow it, she just knew it.

“It’s all right,” Jane is saying. “Look!” She is crumbling the joint in her hand. The curls of hemp shake out between her fingers. “I won’t smoke either. I’ll go on the wagon.”

“Don’t do that—”

“No, I’ve been thinking about it anyway. I’ve been smoking too much.” Wiping her eyes, Saskia looks around for a tissue. “I’ve been terrible,” Jane laughs.

And Saskia laughs with her, flooded with relief. “Where are the darn tissues?”

“Here.”

Saskia honks, and laughs again. She is beginning to feel that cool calm you feel after you have been a baby and made a complete fool out of yourself. When you can’t sink any lower.

“I’ll be a reformed drug addict,” Jane says. “How about that?”

Actually, that sounds kind of neat. A reformed drug addict! Dark circles under your eyes, the pain of the world in them. To have been there and back.

“Are you OK?” Jane asks. There is no wavering in her face, no doubt. She could quit anytime she wanted to. And she would quit for Saskia’s sake. Won’t Saskia walk that road for Jane? How else to share what she knows? Then they could quit together. They could suffer and be strong together. They could write haiku about it.

Deep down, Saskia believes she can overcome anything. The barns’ ridicule at school doesn’t hurt her because she wills it not to hurt. She could smoke a pack of cigarettes every day for a year and then quit, cold turkey. How can she prove she is superior to this hemp business, this stuff that Bill and even Lauren are weak enough to need, if she doesn’t try it and then spurn it? The poor joint lies broken in Jane’s hand. “I want to try it after all,” Saskia says humbly.

“All right!” Jane sweeps together the crumbs and rolls another. “OK, first you take a deep drag.” She lights it and sucks on it as if she were inhaling all the air in the room. She holds herself stiffly, chest out. “Thn hld t n.” Wisps of smoke curl dragon-like from her flared nostrils as she hands the joint to Saskia. “Tzi-zi.” Saskia turns it in her hands. A little stick of pencil shavings. Pathetic really, once you look at it. She feels the strength in her, the imperviousness. She inhales.

Far away, through the hacking and the pain, Jane is patting her on the back. If she could just get her lungs out onto the floor, she could douse them with water. “You’ve got virgin lungs, girl.” Not anymore! On Saskia’s second try the cough erupts again, but less painfully, and on the third she manages to hold her breath for a few seconds. The stuff scrapes around in there, sanding down edges. “There you go! Not so bad, is it?”

“Hm” is all Saskia can say, wide-eyed, holding it in. It tastes like a vacuum cleaner bag. She can see sparks whirling like stars in her deflowered chest, leaving cancerous black holes as they bury themselves in the defenseless membranes. But she feels nothing else. She feels none of the slow tide of warmth, the soothing nonchalance that Jane has described. Willpower. As in her controlled dreaming, she simply says to herself, “I am here. I am Saskia.” Thus does she hold on to herself.

The joint goes back and forth, and she continues to feel nothing. This is immensely reassuring. “Don’t worry,” Jane says. “Sometimes you don’t until the second or third time. It varies. I’m pretty fucked up, anyway. This is superbo stuff. But it’s expensive! Where do Bill and Lauren get theirs?”

“Bluffaroo grows his own.” Down in the hold, in a windowless room, he has trays, banks of lights, timers. His hemp is as doodah as his croutons. It, too, is held up and explicated, its superiority characterized in excruciating detail. “There’s some trick about getting male and female plants together and then frustrating the females.”

“That makes the oils build up. Probably like that congested feeling you get when you’re interrupted.”

“Hm?”

“You know, doing the dirty deed.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Do you think he’d sell to us?”

“I can’t see Bluffaroo being that helpful.”

“Maybe we could just take some.” Jane’s color is high, her espresso eyes glitter, espressivo. Her pointy pink tongue is much in evidence as she talks enthusiastically. She is more beautiful than ever. Saskia wonders why she never before noticed just precisely how beautiful Jane is.

Time for bed. Saskia turns to say something to Jane, but Jane is naked, just like that, rummaging in her overnight bag for her nightgown. Saskia looks away. She has to go to the bathroom to change into her own gown. She stands for a moment at Mim’s door to listen. Once when Mim walked in her sleep, she actually went downstairs. What a spooky sound that was, the creak of the old stairs in the blackness! It took all of Saskia’s courage to get out of bed and follow. “Mim, what are you doing?” But she kept walking without answering. In the darkness of the common room the bat-wing begonia was terrifying, a crouched form ready to flap those leathery wings and lumber aloft, moaning for blood. Mim went right out the front door and down the porch steps. She stopped in the gravel turnaround. She just stood there, with her arms at her sides, staring at nothing, a ghost in the moonlight. “Mim, what are you doing out of bed?” Saskia asked, hugging herself.

“Out of bed?” Mim’s eyes pointed straight ahead.

“What are you doing down here?”

“Down here?”

Saskia took her arm. “Let’s go back up.”

“Out of bed?”

It was one of Saskia’s nightmares come to life, her horrible sneaking suspicion that everybody else in the world is really a robot, that one day when she eavesdrops, say, on Lauren and Bill, she will hear them conversing in dead, flat tones, not bothering to sound human now that the only human is not present. She turned Mim toward the house, nearly fainting with terror that the younger girl would say, “Out of bed? (click) Out of bed? (click) Out of bed?”

The girls smoke a second joint between the sheets. “Damme,” Saskia growls in her Lieutenant’s voice, regarding the joint judiciously. “Damme! A fine cigar, this! It draws well!” Jane laughs and laughs.

Saskia has never had anyone in her bed before. What could Lauren be bitching about? There is just enough room for the two girls to lie comfortably, touching flanks. She is so happy she would like to shout something around the world, or jump sky high. “Look at this.” She turns off the light.

Jane giggles. “What are those?”

“My stars.”

Jane snaps the light back on and stands on the bed to peer at the ceiling. “You can hardly see them when the light’s on.”

The ad in the mail-order catalogue showed the glow-in-the-dark stars sprinkled randomly across some stupid dreg’s ceiling. Saskia stood on a ladder with a star chart crooked in one arm and marked each position with a pencil before sticking a single star. Her ceiling is astronomically accurate: a spring evening in the north temperate zone, circa 9 p.m.

Jane slips under the covers again and huddles against Saskia. “It’s cold out there.”

“There’s some culture where they believe that every person’s soul is tied by a thread to a star,” Saskia says. “When a star falls, the thread is broken, and the person dies.”

“You know the strangest things,” Jane murmurs.

“Which star would you choose to be your soul-star?”

“Haven’t the faintest. Which one is least likely to fall?”

“None of them really fall. Shooting stars are actually meteors.”

They smoke the last of the joint. Long minutes of silence go by.

Then Jane says, “Listen!”

“What?”

“Don’t you hear it?”

Saskia listens. “No.” Then she does. Far away. A barely audible flutter. Slowly growing, coming nearer, a steady determined murmur. King, king, wong-king.

“Geese!” Jane whispers.

A haunting cry like a lonely spirit passing over the house in the night. King, king, king, wong-king. Somewhere up in the darkness a mysterious V points north, heading north. Who knows where? Reedy new-melted ponds set in snowfields, places they remember from last year, the goose at the point leading the way by celestial navigation. The calls are fading now as the geese leave Tylerian air space. King-king. They don’t care about the girls, nor even know that they exist.

Jane sighs. “God, I love that sound! I used to imagine they were talking to me. ‘Come on, girl! Fly!’ In England I used to imagine I’d wandered all my life. I’d pretend I never had a fucking family. I would look at the houses I passed and think, ‘How can people lock themselves up in those cages when the world is so unexplored? The same bed every night? How boring! What’s over that hill? What’s over the next?’ God! The thought that I might just walk over the hill and then over the next one, and the next, never turning back. No one would know who I was. God. I loved the thought of that.”

Saskia thinks of Thomas, walking inland with his oar on his shoulder. He walked until no one knew him or his people, until he was so much a stranger in a strange land that the man at the gate mistook his oar for a winnowing fan. What would Saskia’s “oar” be? How would she know she had truly escaped? Would she carry a mixing bowl, until someone asked why her war drum was uncovered? Would she carry a school paper, until someone asked why she wrote such terribly long and dull haiku?

But Saskia does not want to leave rainy Tyler. She wants to wake up and find that Tyler has left her, that it has been supplanted by a world in which the houses are carved cedar boxes with open doors and Captain’s rooms and uncluttered vistas, a world like the ones pictured on the herb tea boxes, all green fields and blue skies, a world called Ithacan Sunburst.

Saskia doesn’t want to talk anymore. The silence between the girls drifts on, growing deeper. The stars have gone out. Normally Saskia would turn on her lamp again to recharge them, but she doesn’t want Jane to guess that she is afraid of the dark. Her myriad failings rise up vividly before her: her ugliness, her weirdness, her timidity. What on earth does bold, beautiful Jane see in her?

11

Naked, she glides up the stairs. Damme, she will make it this time. She mounts the quarterdeck and opens the door of her cabin. She is wearing fine broadcloth breeches and a cutaway coat with two rows of brass buttons. She would so dearly love to have the brass gilded, but on a Lieutenant’s share of prize money, it just is not possible. The Captain’s scope and hat lie on her desk. A cup of his beloved coffee steams. The Captain’s room is on the poop deck above. How to get up there? She surveys her cabin. There couldn’t be a way up that she has never noticed before.

And yet there is. Memory pours in, filling her like a glass. Yes! There has always been a door between the bed and the bookshelf! How strange that she never opened it before! She opens it. Steep wooden stairs going up. She climbs. I’m coming! She rises into a small space with windows all around, a space soaked with golden light. She can see in all directions over the trees and rooftops of sunny Ithaca, miles north up the mighty blue bay. And the tall Captain is standing there, erect, his back to her, his beautiful, sensitive hands on the wheel. “Captain!” She snaps to attention.

But he does not turn around. His hands grip the wheel, urging it left and right. “Please forgive me, sir. I . . .” What excuse can she proffer? There is no excuse. She leans forward to see his face: gaunt, black with anger. Still not looking at her, he opens his mouth to say something, but his face curdles into a scowl and he stops himself.

She admires this in him, this iron British reserve. She herself is so blabby, always putting her foot in her mouth, always bragging embarrassingly. You can read Saskia like a book. But the Captain brutally suppresses his emotions, and there is something wonderful about the tortured look that spreads over his face as he says nothing, harrumphs, and turns away. She hangs her head. “I betrayed you. I’m sorry.”

He pulls the wheel savagely, with all his strength, and the ship lurches. Loose from its foundations, it lumbers forward with an octaves-deep sound of groaning and grinding. It rolls over one Ithacan house, and another, leaving splinters in its wake. With a final huge and wretched sigh, it tips over the embankment and slides into the water.

The Captain turns from the window. “I . . . I . . . ,” she stutters, on her knees, barefoot, penitent. She awaits the well-deserved stroke. But his dark scowl crumbles. His eyes disappear into squints, his chin trembles. He begins to weep. He does not turn away, he simply stands there with his arms at his sides, weeping piteously. She takes him in her arms and fetches tissues out of her pocket to wipe his slobbery chin. She keeps repeating how sorry she is, yet she knows she will never make up for her betrayal. The ship rocks gently on the water.

12

Elementary school was tolerable. None of Saskia’s teachers knew what to do with her, so they were relieved just to let her work on her own projects, somewhere in the back of the room, or better, out of sight and mind in the library. No one had told Saskia that barns undergo a mysterious and sinister transformation during the summer after sixth grade. On Saskia’s first day at Tyler Junior, someone in the crowded hall called, “Hey, White!” and when she looked around to see who it was, three dregs covered their faces and howled, “Aarrggh! What a dog! Arf, arf, arf!” Barns had broken out of their cocoons and unfolded leathery wings. For some unfathomable reason, sticking to yourself and not bothering anyone was no longer an option. The smallest things you did—a word you used, the way you looked at the bottom of your shoe—were immensely important to other barns. Fully half of them were outright lunatics, devoting great amounts of their time, energy, and ingenuity to making your life miserable.

Saskia wore the clothes she had always worn: nubby wool tights, ankle-length skirts, one cardigan over another, sturdy work shoes. The barns had a field day. Someone wrote “Saskia Witch” on her locker. “Just ignore them,” Lauren said. But Saskia couldn’t. She would walk up to a snorting dreg and stare balefully at him. Then she would inform him he had just been cursed to the seventh generation.

And the teachers! They were crazy, too. Paranoid. They wouldn’t let Saskia work on her own projects, because they were sure she was trying to pull a fast one. They would even take her books away. “I’m sorry, I thought this was a school,” she would say, but they never got the bitter irony. Like all paranoiacs, they were illogically, maddeningly rigid. They would begin, “I understand” or “I’m sorry,” but what followed was a recorded message. Saskia wanted to scream and charge at them, stick them with pins to puncture their eerie robotic demeanors.

Even social studies was a problem. Saskia’s first report was on ancient Egypt, and frankly, she outdid herself. The text was twenty-eight pages. There were drawings of clothes and tools; a series illustrating embalming, step by step; a foldout map of the Nile valley in six colors with a key. Saskia learned some authentic Egyptian writing from an Ithacan library book and wrote a whole page as Queen Shasakhiya of the Fourth Dynasty, outlining her glorious accomplishments. The report came back, and the only marks the Blatt had made were for misspellings. The comments were on the back: “Very enjoyable. Well integrated pictures. Good vocabulary! All in all, extremely well done. Sorry it was so late. D.”

In other classes, things got downright ugly. When the Plebe, during the American poetry unit, ordered her inmates to show their creativity by copying from the textbook three poems they liked and pasting magazine pictures to accompany them, Saskia rebelled, wrote her own haiku, and drew the Plebe in jackboots, wielding a riding crop. The last haiku read:

We’ve learned so much here,

Copying poems word for word.

Thank you, Kommandant!

Not content with merely giving it an F, the Plebe ripped it up. After that, Saskia wouldn’t stop barking “Jawohl!” and goose-stepping around the room until the Plebe caught her arm and actually slapped her (which, by the way, is against the law in this state). Saskia tried to slap her back but missed and, humiliatingly, burst into tears. She was sent to the V.P., who with his flushed bull neck straining at the collar of his polo shirt called her, with his usual self-control, a little snot and a spoiled little brat. Saskia sat quietly and looked at the football trophies on his wall, hoping he would disburden himself of her by, say, drop-kicking her out of school. But though she was snotty, she hadn’t blown anything up, or been caught smoking, so her parole was held up.

Then Jane came. Linking up with Saskia was the worst thing she could have done, tactically speaking. Saskia’s name is on all the bathroom walls. She is the kiss of death.

“What’s a ‘scag’?” Jane asks Saskia, bristling.

“It’s sort of like a ‘scuz,’” Saskia replies. “Only crustier, I think.”

The same dregs who yell “Cross-your-heart bra!” at Saskia started to follow Jane with cries of “Tim-berrrr!” and “See Jane Sing! Sing, Jane, Sing!” They stopped only after Jane held one down by the throat and belted him, giving him the heaves and making him cry. “God, this place sucks,” Jane says. Saskia struggles not to look pleased. There is little chance now that Jane will make other friends.

The girls are called “lesbos.” In every class they sit together, until they are separated. After that they pass notes, which the barns in between can’t read because Jane’s are in Latin and Saskia’s are in Egyptian. The barns pass them anyway, because everyone knows Jane belted a dreg. When a teacher gets dramatic about the girls’ behavior, they roll their eyes and croon “Onnh!” to each other in mock intimidation. “Tough guy!” “Dem’s fightin’ words!” Jane is impregnable, an old hand at this sort of thing. But Saskia is seen as the leader, and after a joint meeting with the V.P. Saskia signs her notes “Saskia ‘Disruptive Influence’ White” and Jane, “Jane ‘Simon Says’ Sing.” They escape together to the stalls of the opium dens, where Jane smokes cigarettes, Saskia essaying a hit or two, and they plan their campaigns. They slip into the woods during recess to share hemp. They skip school once, planning to forge sick notes, but the school calls their homes and Jane is grounded for a week. “Why weren’t you grounded?” she asks Saskia.

“Lauren said she could understand my feelings but skipping only made things worse. So I promised I wouldn’t do it again.”

“Shit, Lauren is great!”

Especially after the skipping episode, hemping in the woods is risky. Saskia tells Jane she wouldn’t mind getting booted out of school, but Jane says her parents told her if she got booted one more time they were going to find a school with searchlights on towers and slavering German shepherds.

Of course sunny Ithaca, with its alternative school, has the answer to all their problems. Saskia saw the school one afternoon when Lauren and she went to see Lauren’s goddess-friend who teaches there. There were students actually hanging around after school. They were dressed in long skirts and scarves. They were chatting in a friendly manner with bearded teachers. A girl went by in bare feet and she was wearing red-and-blue-corded ankle bracelets. She had oil paint on her clothes. Everyone had names like Matteo, Garland, Haven.

If Saskia lived in sunny Ithaca, she would leave her carved cedar box each morning to climb through oak and maple woods to the shining school on the hill. There would be no bells, no big clock. There would be a board for notes. “I’m in room 7,” Saskia would write. “Anyone interested in trig can meet me there.”

She would joust intellectually with the other scholars, honing her dialectical skills in debate: Who was wiser, Aristotle or Plato? Can there be beauty without truth? Which is more fundamental, fire or water? “Here’s a better idea, Bob,” she would say, and show a teacher how to organize his course. She would work prodigiously, memorizing enormous tables of Latin verb conjugations. She would take off her steel-rimmed glasses and pinch the bridge of her nose in scholarly fatigue. She would stay late, and when night fell she would ascend to the observatory and work for hours in the utter quiet, in the soft red light, arcing the telescope from star to star. Like Mim, she would get straight A’s.

But there is a catch. The alternative school is public. You have to live in the district. “So have your parents figured it out yet?” Saskia asks Jane. She means the lower house prices in rainy Tyler.

13

Jewels are her eyes

And satin her raven hair,

Nor blemish has she.

Endless is the love

She dips from me like water

Into her cupped hands.

Now ponder—can you

Guess of whom I speak? She is

Here, if you but look.

14

Being thirteen, Jane can talk about private things, but Saskia will get embarrassed and clam up. Smoking hemp helps, so the weekend afternoons in Saskia’s bed are important opportunities to be guarded jealously. The subject is inexhaustible. Even the briefest selection would have to include:

1) breasts

Jane would like a pair.

“You’re kidding!” Saskia bursts out.

“It’s not fair,” Jane complains. “I’m older than you.”

No matter how “ex” ex-hippies are, they still strip at the drop of a hat, so Saskia has seen naked folksens her whole life, but for some reason she still hasn’t gotten used to it. Lauren is six feet tall. At night when she lets down her floor-length hair, she is Junoesque, a column fluted with the folds of her nightgown, a magnificent upward sweep of Woman. But remove that gown and you see that the classical line is broken. Lauren’s breasts are not small. They are flattened along the top where they sag against her chest muscles, and they bulge out poutingly lower down. As she emerges siren-like from the water hole, they dip and collide with each other. Saskia, in her demure one-piece, quails, embarrassed for her. They are the only part of the female anatomy quite as painful to glimpse as men’s things.

“But Lauren is in her thirties,” Jane points out. “And she never wore a bra.” The role that bras play in eventual boob sag is discussed. Jane cleaves to the old line that years of bralessness cause the breast muscles to stretch and weaken. Saskia read a magazine article in which the opposite was asserted. Bras, it said, allow the breast muscles to atrophy.

So what is a person to do? Bind them, perhaps, thus obviating the dilemma. “I could wrap a towel around myself every day,” Saskia says. Slide a rod through a twist and rotate it, winch-like. Perhaps as it squeezed her, it would make her taller, too.

2) mooniness

Not having had a bout yet, Jane is dying of curiosity. “My mother refuses to discuss it. Whereas I know Dad has given fucking Peter a few man-to-mans.” Saskia can see Mr. Sing in the leatherized den, his meaty arm around Peter’s shoulder, talking and gesticulating obscenely while his son nods and brays. Meanwhile, Mrs. Sing in the gleaming kitchen waggles her head and chirps “No!” as she lightly slaps Jane’s hand.

If Jane’s moor is reluctant to talk about it, Lauren seemed oddly eager. She argued that mooniness was something women should be proud of. Women were in touch with the cycles of life, while men were cut off, oblivious. Every bout of mooniness was like spring, a renewed contact with the powers of regeneration, the turning wheel underlying being and becoming, the mystic female link with blah blah blah.

Saskia wasn’t buying. She was struck only by the lunar connection. “Although my clock isn’t quite right,” she confesses to Jane. “I run fast.” Aye, a precocious Moon! the Sun might say, clapping her proudly on the shoulder.

Lauren’s speech was only the beginning. She was dead set on holding a show-and-tell. “Women’s shame and ignorance of their own bodies is slave mentality, a result of male-dominated society.” Lauren was the only person in the world Saskia could be sort of undressed with, when, say, trying on thrift store clothes. But when Lauren sat on her bedroom rug facing Saskia with her floor-length legs spread and told Saskia to do the same, Saskia wanted to run away. “The female body is a beautiful thing,” Lauren scolded. Saskia spread her legs, and hung her head. Following Lauren step by step, in a daze, she felt around some outer things, touched some inner things, named a couple of things. There was room in her for only one other emotion, throbbing painfully at the edges of her vast embarrassment: envy at Lauren’s perfectly bushy triangle. Lauren had to smooth the curls to either side to show Saskia what she was talking about.

The crowning humiliation came when the first bout arrived shortly afterward, as if Lauren had ordered it for Saskia from a catalogue. “Western life is so empty of ritual, so soulless,” Lauren said. This was by way of explanation for her brainstorm: the mensis meal, which was something like a birthday party except that the guest of honor hid upstairs, refusing to come down until Lauren shamed her into it by reminding her how much work she had put into the preparations. And so, among the red candles, the tomato soup and the beets, while the crew looked on with goggle eyes, Saskia was formally inducted into Womanhood, wishing all the while that the Earth, with which she, as a woman, was supposed to have such affinity, would open up beneath her feet and swallow her.

3) a certain other m word

Jane calls it “the dirty deed,” and it takes Saskia so very long to catch on. Even then she cannot believe it of Jane, not really. It belongs to another world, light-years distant. Could Jane be so far from Saskia that she would have a part in it?

Jane draws well, and since she is not allowed to hang her sketches in Sing Sing, her large brilliant butterflies and her bare-legged girls astride Arabian horses have added to the luxuriant chaos on Saskia’s walls. In her own bedroom, she removes a drawer from her dresser and takes from the space beneath it a sketchbook, which she holds on her lap, turning to Saskia. “You show me everything you do, right?”

“Of course.”

“Absolutely everything?”

Saskia nods.

Jane hands the sketchbook to her. “If you want to look,” she says with uncharacteristic shyness. “These are my secret drawings.”

Secret! How Saskia loves that word. Treasure maps? Codes? No. Naked dregs and pigs. Saskia glances away.

“You think they’re awful!”

“No—”

“You’re turning red!”

“No!” Saskia looks back at the drawings. She turns the pages. “No, I like them,” she says weakly. She frowns judiciously, focusing on a point a few feet beyond the book. They are only kissing and hugging, really. No big deal. “Nice,” she says.

When the sketchbook is back in its hiding place, Jane says, “Don’t you ever?”

“Ever?”

“Do it?” Then, accusingly: “You don’t, do you?”

Do it? How? She doesn’t want to know how. God, what would her men think? Marco, the Captain, and Odysseus are with her always. Would they stand in a circle and watch her? How was it? they would ask at the end, gazing at her intently. Nice? “Do it? Sure,” Saskia says. But a little later, not looking at Jane, she says, “No.”

“Never?”

Must she spell it out? “Never,” she confesses miserably. She feels as if she should shout it so that Jane, on the other side of a widening chasm, might hear it. What? Jane would call back, her voice faint in the rising wind. I said “Never!” Saskia would yell, and the word would be lost, swallowed in the abyss between them.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Jane says. “I think of it all the time.”

4) dregs’ things

Hemp does work wonders. On the first warm day of Tylerian spring, in the post-daffodil, pre-apple-blossom period when the ponds in the dirt roads are at their deepest, Saskia and Jane lie on a warm rock by the lake, looking up at those cumulus clouds flung away by Bluffaroo’s shameless nature, and run through every name they can think of. “Dick,” Saskia is suggesting, her head propped on a root, her legs crossed.

“A kid’s word. Don’t you think?”

“OK. Dink?”

“Come on, even worse.”

“Well I don’t know . . .”

“Prick,” Jane takes over.

Saskia winces. “It’s ugly.”

“Sharp, like pricking your finger.”

“There’s not enough vowel sound. All the really ugly words are like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . you know . . . like shit, or whatever.”

“Shit. Bitch. Tits. Clit. You’re right!”

“What else?” Saskia asks.

“How about penis?”

“How about it?”

They giggle. “Well . . . ,” Jane says, “you always want to say peeenis. Sounds whiny.”

“Sounds shrimpy.”

“Like a mosquito flying into your ear. Pee-EEEE-nis.” They laugh. “Then there’s always phallus.”

“Oh, always.” More laughter. “It’s too academic.”

“It should go next to a diagram. ‘Pictured at right is the human phallus . . .’”

“It could be a Roman general.”

“Punctillius Phallus. Phallus Maximus.”

They are laughing hard now, rolling on the slab. Saskia jumps up and declaims over the water, “Friends, Romans, phalluses, lend me your ears!” This leads to “Four score and seven phalluses ago,” “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their phalluses,” “Shoot if you must this old gray phallus,” and “Give me liberty or give me a phallus.”

“So what else?” Saskia gasps.

“Cock,” Jane says.

That one, for some reason, does pack a punch. Saskia takes a hit off the joint, blushing.

“It’s a tough-guy word,” Jane says. “The leather-jacket guys by the stone wall never say ‘Suck my penis,’ they say ‘Suck my cock.’”

God. Suck my . . . God. Don’t be such a barn. Cock, cock, cock. Suck my . . .

“Hog,” Jane says.

Saskia splutters.

“I heard a guy call his that once. ‘My hog is cold,’ he said.”

“That’s sooo disgusting!”

“Yes, you think of something . . . I don’t know, something snuffling around—” And for minutes afterward, the girls simply howl.

5) IT. home base, all the way, whatever you want to call it

Once you begin on this matter of sex, there is no turning back. Vistas open only on other vistas, depths are plumbed only to reveal depths beneath them. Each revelation is like a door bursting open, letting in an icy blast. Vastamundus! In all its terror and mystery, Vastamundus waits for Saskia. A limitless frozen lake fanned by leathery wings, it is unimaginably, hugely out there. Jane must eventually speak of her personal encounter with sex, with the real thing, dreg and all. One listens to such a thing only in the safest of places: miles under the covers of one’s own bed.

In one of Jane’s schools in Boston there was a dreg, pale and blond with a smooth, angelic face. He was always hanging around the pigs but saying nothing, serenely staring at them with his cloud-gray eyes and listening to their talk. They were used to him and they talked about all sorts of things as if a dreg weren’t there. One day he came up to Jane and said, “Let’s go into the woods together.”

She had heard about this, about him going into the woods. “What for?”

“We could have some sex.”

She laughed. “Forget it.”

He said he had done it with some of the other pigs. He named them. They had gone to a certain place—Jane knew the spot—and they had taken their clothes off. They had lain in the leaves. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s love.”

“Fuck off.”

But the next day when she saw him she said, “All right, let’s do it.” She had thought about how she could say “Fuck off,” but was she so cool? She had kissed a dreg or two. Once she was sharing a blanket with a dreg while watching TV in his room, and he was massaging her bare foot, and he undid his pants and held her foot against his thing while they both continued to watch Monty Python with great intensity. But that was all. She had liked the way this angel dreg had asked, so earnestly. No braying. “It’s love,” he had said, unblinking.

After class they walked to the place in the woods and made a pile of leaves. “Now you take your clothes off,” he said.

“You take your clothes off first,” Jane countered.

“That’s not how it’s done.”

“Forget it, then.”

“Maybe we could take them off together,” he said.

Jane watched him, going no further than he went. But eventually he took off everything, and so did she. Just standing there in the clearing with him, both of them naked, she felt it: what she felt when beginning to do the Deed, a drop in her center of gravity. They lay next to each other in the leaves, which were prickly against her back and legs. At this point, Saskia stops listening. That is hemp’s special protection: tuning out becomes easy, as one’s own thoughts grow irresistible. Saskia pictures the scene vividly, stuck at that moment of lying down. Saskia is with the angel dreg, feeling the “letting down” in her abdomen, a pleasant settling-down-to-business, as if someone were stroking her there, getting her enzymes to flow. The dreg is blindingly white, like a slat of sunlight through curtains. She can see nothing but his slim outline as he lies with her in the leaves. The leaves tickle her back and rub like a bristle brush along her legs. She snuggles down into the leaves. The white small dreg snuggles down after her. She reaches up and gathers him like a doll into her arms. She kisses him, and he kisses back, his mouth surprisingly big and warm. This image and the feeling that comes with it are repeated over and over, as Jane talks in the distance.

Jane pokes her. “So have you ever held one?”

“What?”

“Are you listening? I can’t believe it, you’re not listening!”

“Yes I was.”

“What was I saying, then?”

“You asked if I ever held one.”

“One what?”

Saskia rewinds her tape. “A dreg’s thing.” Held a dreg’s thing? Jane held the angel dreg’s thing in the pile of leaves?

“So have you?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“Now and then.”

“You’re lying!”

“I am not!”

“I dare you to touch one!”

Dare?! You dare to dare me, dusky dryad? Guards! Bring me a dreg’s thing, with all speed! The girls bound out of bed and into the hall. Saskia feels wrapped in cotton. “Quinny!” she hears herself call. “Quinny, come here!” She sees her hand grab the banister, the stairs run up eagerly under her feet. They find him in the crew’s quarters. “Let’s go!” He reaches up from his circle of dinosaurs, the little fool. They run him back up the stairs so fast he trips, so they half lift, half drag him up the last steps and into the cabin.

Jane shuts the door. “Off with your pants, Quinny,” Saskia says. He looks at her blankly. “Come on, off with your pants.” Saskia unsnaps them. Quinny whines, “Noo.” He bends and presses the waistband to himself with his forearms. Saskia reaches for the zipper and he doubles over. Insolence! “Jane—” she motions. Jane grabs Quinny from behind and pulls his arms back, straightening him out against her knee. Saskia hauls down his pants and underwear. They catch on his shoes. His thing is pointed like a crayon and hooked, crouching protectively over his bag. Hook and bag are shamelessly hairless, as white as the angel dreg in the leaves, with blue shadowed in the depths. Ugly, like a blind worm, like something grown in the cellar. Saskia cups her hand and drops it over the bag and hook as you would trap a moth on the wall. The bag is warm and soft in her hand. The hook is rubber tubing with something firmer, like clay, inside. Saskia squeezes it between her fingers so Jane can see. “Ow!” Quinny says, and goes from blubbers to frightened wails.

“How does it feel?” Jane asks. The bag is tightening, shrinking away from her, becoming a wrinkled walnut. Saskia squeezes it harder. “Ow!” She takes Jane’s free hand and pulls it down. Their two hands are side by side, one yellow and one mahogany against Quinny’s white thighs. “It feels like all the others,” Saskia says. “Don’t you think?” With great concentration, the girls take turns rubbing it and pulling on it, but eventually Jane says, “I guess he’s not old enough,” and Saskia pushes him away with a disgusted sound. “Ugh. Of course not.”

Quinny runs for the door. But he is hobbled by the pants around his shoes and so he falls on hands and knees. His thing gives a little squirt. “He’s pissing!” Jane shrieks, laughing. Saskia can’t resist giving his smooth white bottom a nice smack, and he howls and squirts again, a real stream. Then she gives him another smack—the smack of a delicious kiss on the hand-shaped red mark.

15

For years the whole house was mine. On Saturday mornings, Lauren would back Betsy up to the storage shed and we would stack crates full of good things in Betsy’s bed. The Sun would rise, shaking his mane, as we drove down to the bustling Farmers’ Market in sunny Ithaca.

That was the best day of the week. The old jousting field just outside Ithaca was covered with stalls and tents. The striped awnings snapped in the breezes coming off the lake. Lauren and Saskia would fold out a table next to Betsy and arrange their inviting wares. The buyers came from all over Vastamundus, drawn by the far-flung fame of Huge Red. They would descend from the glass and stone buildings on the hill to wander among the stalls, inspecting the wares and murmuring outlandishly. Listening to them, Saskia knew that one day she would go up the hill to Huge Red and learn those languages. Then, when she was running her own stall someday, she would greet every wanderer flawlessly in the right language. Soon they would buy only from her.

When I entered school, the teachers marveled at my ability. They soon realized they had nothing to teach me. My love of solitude by then was so great that I found the presence of barns disturbing. I rebuffed, perhaps unkindly, the efforts of others to make friends with me.

In my seventh summer an abandoned moor with four young barns came to our door, seeking succor. Lauren and I discussed the matter at length and decided to take pity on them. The moor was undeserving. Our charity was for the barns’ sake.

From the first day, Melanie was as sweet and adorable as always, though for a long while she stuttered. The twins bullied the youngest, two-year-old Quentin. Barns, like wolves, will always gang up on the weakest member. They have no moral sense. Saskia has always sympathized with the weak and the outcast, such as one could never have hoped for in a young person. Using sympathetic magic, she cured M-M-Melanie of her stuttering by renaming her Mim, and she gave young Quentin strength by renaming him Tarquin, after the Etruscan warrior kings.

She knocked herself out for the crew. Because of them, she could no longer go to the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, but she never reproached them for that. All weekend, and under her lamp at night, she pondered how to help them. She drew up lessons in math, English, and culture. They sat before her in a two-by-two grid. She administered tests, corrected their answers, gave out grades, and pasted color-coded stars on their foreheads. She devised treasure hunts, with hidden clues leading to other clues, or to maps in code. The clues were clever:

It hangs on a wall,

You see in but can’t go in—

But Alice did once.

Birthdays were like Midsummer’s Eve, when the Lord of Misrule reigns, and to everyone’s delight the last becomes first. Saskia would dress like a lowly serving wench and cook a seven-course meal for the birthday barn, and hand him or her a menu in floral script, saying, “For your delectation,” bowing humbly. Between courses she would ask sir or madam if the joint was to their liking.

Most importantly, she gave them what all barns need: magic. On their first day of school she would don a cloak, wave her hands impressively around their heads and shoulders, and explain that she had woven a protective spell around them. She would tell them on a summer evening as they went to bed to look out for the fairy-of-the-lake that night, and as twilight deepened she would slip outside in a white sheet and sparkling silver veil and dance in the high grass beneath their window.

Under my firm yet kindly command, the crew slowly came away from the brink of mutiny to which their previous captain had goaded them. It became a joy to me to hear once again the laughter of a happy crew as they danced the hornpipe or set to work with a will.

Sometimes, coming back in Betsy from the great Ithacan library, Saskia would suddenly feel like the absolute last place on earth she wanted to go was back to Tyler and the crew, back to the same troubles and duties. She would feel so old and tired. Lauren would drive up the hill out of Ithaca, north through the town of Ulysses, skirting the towns of Hector and Ovid. And set amidst them all, unaccountably, was the sore thumb: Tyler. Not a Greek or Trojan warrior, nor a poet, but a president no one ever heard of—“What number was he?”—who became president only because the real president had died, who was thrown out of his own party and called “His Accidency.” And Saskia’s town was not even really named after him, but after a postmaster who lived at a lonely crossing next to a cornfield in the nineteenth century.

She would stick her head out the window of the speeding truck and let the wind flap in her ears. Fuppituh-fuppituh-fuppituh. The hoofbeats of a Mongolian horseman. He was just out of sight, in the next dimension. All he saw as he galloped were the limitless steppes. But he could hear Betsy’s engine, so he worked his steed into a lather, giving chase to this phantom growling through the endless grass. “Aiyaruk!” he shouted. He wore his black hair in thick greased braids. Fuppituh-fuppituh-fuppituh. Stop! she wanted to tell Lauren. She would look back to catch a glimpse, but as she looked the sound would stop. He was like a dim star that you can only see out of the corner of your eye. “Aiyaruk!” Lauren drove on mercilessly. He would rein in his exhausted horse and raise his arm in farewell. The phantom growl would fade in the fitful wind.

One day he will catch her. Stretched to the utmost from the back of his steed, he will tear the fabric of space and pluck her through Betsy’s window. They will gallop together through the sea of grass under the limitless skies, not moving themselves, but turning the Earth beneath their horses’ hooves like a ball.

16

Jane is spending every weekend at White-on-the-Water. “My parents approve of you,” she tells Saskia with a derisive laugh. “They say you’re responsible, ‘unlike the hooligans I usually hang around with,’ bitch bitch.”

“But I am responsible,” Saskia protests.

“Not the way they mean,” Jane says with satisfaction.

These weekends together, light-years from school and Sing Sing, are paradise. By Friday evening, the girls are done with all the homework that is not too stupid or too demeaning to do, and after that they are as free as geese. Jane is a fount of ideas for Adventure. Under her direction (with Saskia as Technical Adviser) the girls shanghai the crew for a session of slave buying in the tented courts of Khan-balik. The slaves, hobbled, are led from their cage to the auction block, where the two bidders feel their muscles and examine their teeth. Saskia bids astronomically on the heavy-haired Babylonian maiden, while the degenerate Etruscan is gaveled down for a pittance.

With the first tolerably sunny days of spring—even Tyler gets some occasional sun, mainly to remind you of what you’re missing—come a move outside and the inauguration of the Khanate wars, to which the meadows and woods around White-on-the-Water are admirably suited. Aiyaruk is a giantess. She was born the daughter of Kaidu Khan, in Samarkand, in the heart of Grim Tartary. When it came time for her to marry, she told her father she would wed the man who could vanquish her in a trial of strength. Since Aiyaruk was beautiful and charming, men came from all over to make trial with her. The pact was this: if the youth could vanquish Aiyaruk, then he should have her to wife, but if Aiyaruk should vanquish the youth, then he must forfeit to her a hundred horses. The contest of strength was arm wrestling. Aiyaruk amassed more than ten thousand horses, and never married.

There is not much known about Aiyaruk’s adversary. She seems happy simply to be on a horse with weapons in hand, surrounded by her fanatically loyal soldiers. There was some trouble over her name. The Technical Adviser drew up a list of possibilities: Ogodai Khan, Chagatai Khan, Mongu Khan, Batu Khan, Hulagu Khan. The Director wanted Al-Embroidia Al-Fastansia Al-Marammjibwa Khan. Impossible, said the Technical Adviser. Why? demanded the Director. Because it has to sound Mongolian, that’s why, not like a tablecloth pattern. There was a small fight. But they settled eventually on the Dark Khan. The Director liked the mystery of it. The Technical Adviser liked the accuracy.

As extras, the crew are bounced from role to role according to need: slave, concubine, herald, cannon fodder. Their lines are easy: “What, ho!,” “Yes, my liege?,” and “I fear I breathe my last.” The gages are thrown, the mediations scorned, the anathemas pronounced. Aiyaruk beats her breast and intones, “I will not live or rule if I do not wreak a revenge on the Dark Khan of which the whole world will speak!” She and her army draw up in battle array in front of the barn, while the Dark Khan arrays hard by White Creek. The standards snap smartly in the sharp wind. The Maid of Samarkand, resplendent in white armor, flies the feared ensign of sable, illumined by crescent and sol. The Dark Khan, stunning in cochineal, flies gules, lion passant, or. (“Singh” means “lion” in some language.) The war drums begin to beat and both sides charge, setting arrows to the string. None can doubt then that they are mortal enemies. Ash branches make fine bows, and lethal arrows when finned with cardboard. The best material for spears are lengths of bamboo, painstakingly sharpened on the concrete floor of Betsy’s garage and hardened in the eyes of the stove. The metal shields are circular, ridged concentrically. Sunlight gleams from the copper tops of the helmets.

Mim and Austin distinguish themselves by their bravery. Shannon is cautious, but stout withal. Quinny is hopeless. He runs the wrong way. An arrow whizzes by him and he collapses, blubbering. He says his helmet hurts. He drops his spear. All prisoners, following the Tartar custom, are castrated and enslaved. Another custom is that neither Aiyaruk nor the Dark Khan can be made a prisoner. If one is captured by the other, she is honored for her prowess. She gives her parole that she will not escape until the ransom is paid, so no restraints are necessary. The two drink claret in the captor’s tent and speak admiringly to each other in clipped understatement.

One weekend, Jane has to go with her family to Niagara Falls. “Maybe I can send them over in a barrel,” she says. That weekend, Saskia finds the crew impossible to handle. They don’t want to go on a treasure hunt, they don’t want a story read to them. They want only to be warriors. “It’s raining, anyway,” Saskia points out. Then they want to be slaves. “When is Jane coming over?” they keep asking, until Saskia is ready to stick them in the oven and serve them for dinner. Well why shouldn’t they prefer Jane, since Jane doesn’t keep the Judgment Book or herd them to school in the mornings? It only makes sense and Saskia doesn’t care in the least. Her job is not to be liked by her crew, but to have her orders obeyed. When Jane comes the next weekend, the crew crowds around her, pressing on her the banner of the lion passant and saying, “Let’s go.” Even the sun has come out again to welcome well-loved Jane, and everyone heads for the meadow.

17

“Saskia, let’s talk.” When the hairbrushing goes on for a while, it sometimes puts Lauren in the mood. This is when Saskia might get a Thomas tale, if she plays her cards right. “You’re twelve years old.”

“Correct.”

“I understand this is a rough time.”

“Doesn’t seem so bad.”

“I had a rough time too at your age. Everybody does. Your body is changing, your interests are changing. You’re feeling a lot of new things you don’t understand. You need to act out, I know that.”

“Mm.”

“You’re a very private girl, Saskia. You never tell me what’s bothering you. I’m always here to listen. You don’t have to tell me. It’s all right to be private.” There is a pause. Saskia fluffs Lauren’s hair. “But when you don’t tell me anything, I don’t find out about problems until somebody else tells me. That’s not being considerate. Are you listening?”

“Sure.”

Lauren’s voice focuses a little. “That’s embarrassing for me.”

“Who said something to you?”

“I got a call from the school.”

“What about?”

“About your behavior, what else?”

“I figured that. What about my behavior?”

Lauren turns in her chair and looks resentfully at Saskia. “Don’t be like that, I’m talking to you like an adult.” She turns back. Saskia brushes. “I count on you. You have to be more responsible than other girls your age.”

“I am.”

“Well that’s what I count on.”

“So what about my behavior?” Or is this twenty questions?

Lauren continues in a lighter tone: “I’m so glad you’ve found a friend. We’re so isolated out here. I had a close friend when I was your age and it was very important to me.”

A difficult age, yes. We’ve already established that.

“Jane seems like a good friend.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s very pretty.”

Saskia counts to ten. “But what about my behavior?”

“It was the Vice Principal who called.”

“He’s a rawhole—”

“Please, Saskia! Don’t use those words! They really grate on me! There’s a perfectly good English word—”

“OK, he’s an asshole.”

“Whether he is or not, you and Jane are treading on thin ice. That’s what he told me.”

“You still haven’t said what I’ve supposedly been doing.”

“Smoking reefer.”

Saskia doesn’t answer. She kind of thought nobody knew that.

“Is this something Jane got you to do?”

“No.”

“I see some wildness there. The pretty ones can get away with things.”

“What’s the big deal? You smoke it all the time.”

“You’re too young to handle it wisely.”

“Not like you.”

“Yes. Not like me. And I don’t smoke it ‘all the time.’ And anyway, if you get into trouble at school, what am I supposed to do? Have you thought about that? Have you taken a single minute to think about me, about everyone else here? Or are you only thinking about yourself?”

“I won’t smoke in school anymore.”

Lauren’s eyes move over her face like searchlights. “You promise?”

“Of course I promise.”

“Well that’s something, anyway.” Her eyelids descend to half-mast, her cheeks bunch into hard buns. This is the look that comes over her when she is getting her way. She runs a hand through her hair, suggesting puzzlement at the interrupted brushing. Saskia resumes. “It would be much better if you stopped completely.”

Saskia knows Lauren’s strategies. That switch back to her normal tone, in which she sounds like she is speaking to you from the fourth dimension, means she’s achieved what she really wanted. “I don’t see why, if you do it, I can’t do it.”

“How much do you smoke?”

“Maybe one joint a day? Max.”

“Hm.” Lauren is quitting the field. Her ensign is argent, a laurel, vert. It shows to best effect when flapping in full retreat. “That’s one too many. But I suppose it could be worse. I don’t appreciate Jane getting you into it.”

“I tried it before Jane did.”

“Yes, it’s good to protect your friend. I protected my friend, too. Friends are more important at your age than parents, aren’t they? No responsibilities, just fun and games.”

Just bugle sounds, fading.

18

Saskia is instantly awake, her heart pounding. She turns on the lamp and sits up, holding the covers to her chin. When the sound comes again, she almost jumps out of her skin. Fingers rattling like twigs, tapping on the black square of her window. A murmur, a moan for blood. “Saskia!” She presses herself back against the wall. Oh no oh no. The moan comes again. “Saskia! Open the fucking window!”

Jane? Windows are horrible things at night. You approach, and all you see in them is yourself coming fearfully nearer, your face a smudge, your eyes empty sockets. Will a claw grab your hand as you lift the sash? “Saskia!” Only speed can save you. She runs toward the ghost running toward her in the glass and throws up the sash. “For chrissake I thought you’d never open it!” In the long grass below, Jane is standing in the moonlight. “Get down here, girl!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Just get down here!”

Saskia closes the window. Go out? Into the dark? She puts on her Lieutenant’s slippers and robe. She ventures out to the top of the stairs. She goes back to get her spear from the weapon rack behind her door, and sallies down. Jane has come around to the front porch steps. “What’s the matter?” Jane beckons. Saskia steps out on the porch. The night air is cool. “Let’s go inside.”

“No, this way,” Jane says. Saskia hesitates. “Saskia, come on!” Saskia closes the front door and goes down the steps. “What’s that?”

“My spear.”

“Oh . . . fine. Keep an eye out.” Jane heads up the driveway and Saskia follows. “I thought I was going to wake up the whole fucking house.”

“Why didn’t you just come in and get me?”

“What, aren’t the doors locked?”

“Why would the doors be locked?”

Jane snorts. “I suppose it figures.”

The girls head up the dirt road. Trees block out the moonlight. Saskia balances the spear in her hand. “So where are we going?”

“Just a short way.”

“How did you get here?”

“I drove.” Past the first switchback they come to a car.

“You drove this?”

“Sure.” Jane climbs into the back seat and slides over. “Come into my lair, my pretty, heh heh.”

Saskia gets in. Jane leans into the front seat and punches in a little doorknobby thing on the dashboard. She slips in a tape and her favorite group comes out of two grilled areas under the back window. Saskia looks around at the burgundy interior, feels the leatherette armrest. “Gee, this isn’t so bad—”

“So the fucking school called my fucking mother.”

“Oh . . . Yeah, they called Lauren, too—”

Jane punches the seat in front of her. “I’m fucking grounded again! I can’t believe it. I’m so ripshit!”

The knob on the dashboard pops, and Jane holds it to the joint in her mouth. “It’s a lighter!” Saskia exclaims before she can stop herself. What a rube! Her editor doesn’t work well at night.

Jane passes the joint and on a stream of spent smoke says, “It was the fucking Vice Principal.”

“That’s what Lauren said.”

“He dies.” Jane says it matter-of-factly, and a thrill trickles down Saskia’s neck. Jane brandishes the spear. “He gets this between the shoulder blades. I have to put my foot on his back to rip it out of him. I clean his lungs off it with paper towels.”

“Dis-guusting!”

“A lesson to traitors.” Jane tokes and smolders, especially beautiful. “Grounded!” she mutters. “I’ll show them fucking grounded. I’ll drive all the way to Canada if I want to. I’ll write them a postcard from Canada saying kiss my ass, signed ‘Your grounded daughter.’ Ha!”

“How long?”

“Two weeks! It’s all so fucking hypocritical! Suddenly it’s this big deal, like it’s this huge surprise. They’re just ripshit because I got caught and it makes them look bad, their daughter the derelict. So what did Lauren say? Let me guess, she said she could relate and you need your space and there’s no problem.”

“I promised I wouldn’t smoke in school again.”

“And she believed you?”

“I won’t smoke in school again. I gave my parole.”

“But that’s it?”

“She can’t ground me.” Saskia giggles at the idea. “I’m here all the time anyway.”

“Two fucking weeks! I’ll die cooped up that long! You know my mother said something about you and me maybe not spending so much time together.”

“I thought she approved of me.”

“She does, but she says I’m corrupting you. How’s that for loyalty? ‘That nice girl’ blah blah blah. My own fucking mother!”

“So is she going to keep us apart or something?”

“I’d like to see her try. I’ll fucking show her you and me. I’ll drive here every night for the next two weeks. We’ll sneak you into my room. They’ll find out we’ve been fucking living together. Nobody tells me what to do about my friends, nobody.”

The joint shrinks to a confetti speck and a second is lit. Jane’s face slowly unknots. By the time Saskia asks about the driving, Jane is calm enough to explain. The Sings lived in a row house in Boston and there were cars everywhere. There was no danger of her parents suspecting even if they heard the engine. The Boston drives were just joyrides, when the Moon was up and her parents were being more-than-usual rawholes. Once she drove to Walden Pond and walked barefoot on the shore. She listened to the frogs and trees like old Henry David. Another time she drove to her school and broke a window. In Tyler the garage is only big enough for one car, so the second is parked on the sloping driveway. You put the car in neutral, take off the emergency brake, and roll right into the street, silent as you please.

Saskia is filled with admiration. The two girls are slumped together companionably, passing the second joint back and forth. The pauses between sentences have grown deep. This is the right moment, the right place. “This is so hoogily,” she says.

“What does ‘hoogily’ mean, anyway?”

“You know.”

“I mean what exactly does it mean?”

Saskia ponders. “It means . . . I don’t know, just hoogily. Us being together in here is hoogily. It wouldn’t be hoogily if only one of us was here.”

“So it’s like, um, snug?”

“As the proverbial bug.”

“In the proverbial rug.”

“Maybe it comes from the word ‘hug.’ Hugs are hoogily.”

A long silence.

Jane stubs out the speck of the second joint, a quick and nervous movement. She frowns to herself. She turns in the seat and slips her arms around Saskia. “Like this, you mean.”

“Um . . . yeah.”

“This is hoogily,” Jane says, still frowning.

“Yeah.” Saskia can hardly speak, she is blushing so madly. She does not move a muscle. Her present is stretching, flowing in both directions toward infinity. Jane kisses her cheek. A sweet, chaste kiss. Her eyelids flutter against Saskia’s temples like butterfly wings. “You are . . . so . . . small!” she whispers in her ear.

“I know that,” Saskia says ruefully.

“I like that. You’re not gawky like me. You’re a package.” She squeezes Saskia, as if trying to make her even smaller. “We have to swear to be best friends forever.”

“Yeah.”

“But we have to swear it. We have to swear to have total trust in each other, that we’ll never hide anything from each other no matter how personal or embarrassing.” Just as Saskia’s men know Saskia. But they know everything at once, from the first moment. Who knows what secrets about Saskia might disgust Jane, might ruin everything? But with Jane’s arms around her, she says yes, she will swear.

But how to do it? They ponder the problem.

They put their right hands together, palm to palm, and knuckle their bowed foreheads. They swear on everything they hold dear. They swear on the powers of the Moon and stars, of coats of arms and books of wisdom. But Jane says it is not enough. This is the most important moment of their lives. Everything will be different after this night. She opens the door. “We have to go outside.”

The girls stand together in the dirt road. No wind. The waxing Moon is somewhere behind the trees, sinking. Saskia can hardly see Jane, though she is only a foot away. Where is her spear? “We have to take off our clothes.”

“You think?”

“It’s the only way. We have to stand naked before God.”

Naked before God . . . It sounds wonderfully solemn. But naked before Jane?

Jane is taking off her clothes. “We have to run through the woods naked. We have to let the trees know us.”

“It’s cold . . .”

“Not if you run. Come on!”

Hesitantly, Saskia parts her robe and shrugs it off. But what to do with it? Jane is dropping her things right in the dirt, even kicking them away. No, not her loyal Lieutenant’s robe. Saskia folds it and places it gently on the trunk of the car. Stay there, now. You wait for me. She is cold in her flannel nightgown. This is enough, surely. Saskia does not have to glance away from Jane this time, she cannot even see Jane in the darkness, only a flash of teeth as a hand tugs at her nightgown. Her voice is good-natured: “Come on, scaredy-cat!” Saskia gulps down air. No, no. I won’t. She pulls the nightgown up over her head and holds it away from her. Take it. The night air is all over her, lips as big as cushions, mouthing her warmth. She is dissolving into the night air. Jane puts the gown next to the robe. “And the slippers, girl,” she says softly. Saskia eases them off. The pebbles of the road are painful against her feet. She is covered in goosebumps. What has she always known? She is not naked, before Jane or God, nothing wonderful or solemn. She is only plucked.

“Let’s go!” Jane takes her hand and pulls her down into the ditch lining the road. Saskia bottoms out and lurches up the other side. The woods close in overhead. She stumbles along, her feet smarting on the pine needles and cones. She stubs her toes on something and almost falls. Jane drops her hand. “Wait! Wait!” Saskia cries. She can’t see Jane ahead of her, she can hardly see the ground. She has no spear, no hair. She blunders on, terrified. She can hear Jane running ahead through the leaves. “Come on!” Jane calls. “Please wait!” Saskia almost shrieks it. “I’m right here,” Jane says, as Saskia runs into her. “Let’s go!” She grabs Saskia’s hand again and runs off in a new direction. The ground rises and dips, Jane pulls her this way and that between the trees, they scrape through a bush and another, they half fall down a slope into a leafy bowl. There are leaves all over her, paper-thin shells against her skin, crumbs of dirt on her stomach, something touching every part of her as if she fell into the mouth of the world, every inch of her skin howling. Clambering out of the bowl, she puts her free hand on something slimy, and the howl becomes a wail. Yugh, I can’t. “Just go, stupido,” Marco growls. “Don’t let go of her hand.” “I’m trying not to—” “Well don’t, then. Go!” “I’m going, I’m going!” Through more bushes and leaves. Across a fallen tree. Dirt caked on her thighs, wetness running down her knees. On and on, deeper and deeper into the woods, until they couldn’t possibly find their way back. Her skin is drawing in, shrinking to a wizened lump like a dried apple. They are miles in now, beyond all help or hope of discovery. They will lie in the leaves and freeze to death.

A clearing. A steep stony slope rises in front of them and Jane starts up it. She drops Saskia’s hand to scrabble in the sand and Saskia chases her frantically up the slope, the sand and pebbles giving way under her feet so liberally it’s like trying to run up a down escalator. She pushes with her legs, she grabs with her hands and sinks to her elbows, she flails upward, pebbles and sand cascading around her, tickling, scouring off the dirt, soaking up the wet. She reaches the top feeling as bristly as a porcupine, every quill standing out and vibrating. The flat top is a narrow band. She is back on the road. Jane is a bar of darker dark swinging a pendulum of hair, bobbing away from her. “Come on!” Saskia catches up with her on the far side of a curve. Miraculously, the car is there, and Jane next to it, picking her clothes up out of the dirt.

Now a strange thing happens. During the seconds it takes Saskia to shrug on her nightgown and robe, the terror she felt in the woods drains out of her and filling her to replace it is elation. She is no longer cold. Even the darkness is not dark. Her soles burn, a toe is stinging, she can feel the grit beneath her clothes, the scrapes on her sides swelling hive-like, throbbing, yet she dances around the car, whirling with her arms straight out, the stars visible between the trees overhead spinning around her. Her spear is in her hand. She thought she loved Jane. But she had no idea what love was. Her love is so great now it bursts out of her and floods the woods, the whole nighttime world, with warming cold and darkness visible.

It cannot end here, she realizes. No, not now, not this short of some glorious culmination. Something else must happen to carry her over the top. Something exactly right. She takes Jane’s hands in hers and shines her silver light into Jane’s midnight eyes. “The last thing,” she says. “We have to worship Marilyn.”

---

•   •   •

The barn is always warmer than the night. The girls light their candles. Shadows dip and sway like udders. Marilyn steams like a furnace doused with water. You can hear the gurgle of the green fuel in her chambers. She gives out a grunt and her head lifts, swivels toward the girls and regards them wonderingly with bulging dragon eyes in which the candle flames jiggle. “It’s all right,” Saskia says.

“Pouhhf,” says the coo, blowing veldt air on Saskia and rolling her eyes. The girls pat her on the hip knobs, slide their feet under her flanks and wriggle their toes. With a groan and a long-suffering look, Marilyn lumbers up. Jane and Saskia sit side by side on the milking stool and stroke her toasty udder, tingling with white hairs. Reluctantly, knowing it is not the usual time, Marilyn lets down. The veins bulge, the hoses swell. She looks at the girls apologetically as if to say, “Well, dears, you asked for it.” Saskia leans forward and presses her cheek into the bristle as she rollingly squeezes. Jane is sitting behind her, her arms along her arms, holding her hands. “Good girl,” Saskia murmurs into the octaves-deep gurgling. The bucket plashes and foams.

Afterward, Marilyn eats her grass with her legs tucked demurely under. She will expect to be milked regularly at 2 a.m. from now on. Coos are consummate ritualists. They are to be worshiped because they fit into their spaces more securely than any other of God’s creatures. The girls put the pail of milk on the barn floor and place the candles on either side. They kneel.

“Marilyn,” Saskia intones, “we worship thee.”

“Marilyn,” Jane repeats, “we worship thee.”

“We ask you—”

“We ask you—”

“—in the name of the great and holy coo of vast and wise India—”

“—in the name of the great and holy coo of vast and wise India—”

“—to grant us an eternal bond of love—”

“—to grant us an eternal bond of love—”

“—stronger than anything or anybody—”

“—stronger than anything or anybody—”

“—anywhere.”

“—anywhere.”

Saskia ponders. Marilyn lets out a loud pouff.

“We seal this prayer to you—”

“We seal this prayer to you—”

“—on pain of death and eternal damnation—”

“—on pain of death and eternal damnation—”

“—by drinking of your holy milk.”

“—by drinking of your holy milk.”

“So promised, and done as promised, on this the Lord’s day—”

“So promised, and done as promised, on this the Lord’s day—”

“—the third of May, in the year one, anno bovinus Marilyni.”

“—the third of May, in the year one, anno bovinus Marilyni.”

Marilyn rolls her tongue far out along the trough, reaching for grass. Saskia dips a ladle into the bucket and hands it to Jane, who gazes steadily into her eyes as she drinks. Saskia dips the ladle again and drinks herself. Then she dips it a third time and pours the milk onto the floor. “So is it done,” she says. The girls blow out the candles.

They walk up to the house in holy silence and part without a word. Saskia crawls back into bed. She can see herself riding in the car with Jane, laboring up the switchbacks to the county road, arrowing through dark fields, rolling between the rows of uniformed houses standing at attention, cutting the engine and coasting up the driveway, creeping to her room so quietly ankle-deep in troll’s hair, slipping into her bed. Saskia is in two places at once. She is flank to flank with Jane. Sleeping together each night, naked before God and each other, they will show Sing Sing that grounding Jane is simply irrelevant.

19

Saskia is in the Captain’s room. Beneath her spreads all Ithaca. On the water of the bay rides an open boat, oars tossing up the sea spray. It hits the shore so fast it rides up onto the land. The oarsmen lift out food and casks of red wine, bronze tripods, cauldrons. They lift out something wrapped in a coverlet and set it gently on the sand.

A man, asleep. All that is visible is his curly red hair. The oarsmen drag their boat to the water and row back up the bay. The man lies on his native ground, asleep in the deepest, sweetest sleep, a sleep most like death. Home at last, at long last, home again. He looks defenseless, curled up under the coverlet on the shore of the big bay, and Saskia wants to go down and protect him, she wants to move his tripods and cauldrons behind some trees so no one will rob him while he sleeps.

But girls are playing down there. Naked girls who have finished the laundry are throwing a ball. She knows what is going to happen. So she makes it happen. She causes one of the girls to throw the ball too far. The tallest one tries to catch it. She runs reaching out, her black hair streaming behind her, but the ball skitters off the ends of her chasing fingers and falls, bounces, rolls.

It rolls near the man, and the dark tall naked girl chases it. And she in the Captain’s room remembers finally, completely, where she is. She is sprawled on her stomach on her bed in her Captain’s cabin. Everything below happens because of her. The very first time she did it, as she does it now, in the web of the done. She presses her face into the warm yielding glass. The dark girl reaches for the ball where it lies near the man. The split-second nexus—

Wake! she commands.

The man wakes.

Stop!

The girl stops.

The man rolls onto an elbow and looks up at the mahogany girl. His reddish beard is thickly curled. His face is blunt, cunning, strong. They gaze at each other as she holds them for a long moment. His first view of home: the girl who has been waiting for him without knowing it. The bed is bristly, shivering warm against her stomach.

Now!

The man throws off his coverlet. He too is naked, his body compact as an oak barrel. He lunges forward and clasps the girl’s legs. “I am at your knees, O Queen.” The girl bows, touching his hair. She bends lower to kiss the top of his head, his cheek. The hide against her stomach stirs. The man slides his strong hands up the flanks of the girl and pulls her to the ground in front of him and the stirring hide is drawing back along her abdomen like an undertow pulling the water taut as he grasps her dark ankles and pulls her long legs around him, and he covers her, and she enfolds him, and he is home, and he is hers, and the water rushes forward carrying her along the top of the cresting wave for a long breathless instant until she is curled under, pounded down into the surf and left at last in the shallows like a thrown stone, the water rippling deliciously away.

20

The years went ‘round in their seasons. The apples and pears swelled on the branches and were duly harvested. Each spring came, with rain and more rain, and the lengthening of days. I grew slowly in Wisdom.

But something was missing. The winters were not as cold, the colors were not as bright. Perhaps as I grew in Wisdom, I understood better how lonely it is at the top. The crew filled the ship with “the patter of little feet,” but it was not enough.

Saskia tried twice to make friends in Tyler Junior. But neither time worked out. The atmosphere was too poisoned. Saskia was the kiss of death. The pigs she tried to make friends with turned out to be the worst of all. They waited until her defenses were down and then socked it to her. Her secrets were broadcast. One of the pigs who betrayed her fell down an elevator shaft (everyone blamed everyone else). The other was hit by a school bus and trapped underneath. The driver made it worse by backing up. Dis-guusting! Then Saskia saw the new girl in the V.P.’s office.

And it came to pass with the passing of days that a new girl knocked at the gates of Tyler Junior. Her shield was gules, lion passant, or. “Say the password, friend, and enter,” smirked the leprotic gatekeeper.

The new girl answered calmly, “Friend.”

The gatekeeper’s smile froze. His nose fell off. The people cheered. The gates swung wide.

Those are the last words of Saskia’s autobiography. (Actually, Saskia sort of borrowed that password trick from The Lord of the Rings, but probably no one will notice.) Each time she’s done a rewrite, she has faltered here. What could she add? There was both too little to say and far too much. Something else had begun with Jane’s arrival. Now she writes without hesitation, filling the rest of the page:

EPILOGUE:

Thus it was that Jane Sing and Saskia White, after many trials, found each other at last. And thus it was that they swore to each other, on the most solemn of vows, a bond of eternal love. The two halves of the soul had come together as one. Together, whole in each other, Jane Sing and Saskia White lived for many years, until the Last Days and the destruction of Novamundus.

Jane Sing and Saskia White lived happily ever after! That is the line on which you close the book.

21

8 May

Lauren and my Saskia:

Missing you, and thinking: I find myself with unexpected resources. How about a summer trip? I will pay all expenses. This is the best idea I’ve had in years. Say yes. It has been too long.

Love, Thomas