Philip was at long last gone and the vacation over, our school lives resuming. Somehow, though, I did not feel the same after being May Hill’s prisoner. That’s how it seemed to me, that she had captured me, that she’d put me in her own bedroom, that she meant to fatten me up or starve me. The story could go either way when it came to how much food, but the outcome for the girl, whether fat or thin, would be the same. Ultimately nothing left of Mary Frances but bones. I would have liked to tell William about the capture but for a reason I didn’t understand—even though I lived in my own self, and should understand my own reasons—I didn’t want to tell him.
Mrs. Kraselnik could see there was something wrong with me, because every now and then when I was staring out the window, in my mind chained to May Hill’s radiator, she would say in her stern low voice, “Mary Frances, are you there? Where have you gone?” I’d have to shake myself back to the four–five split, wishing I could explain how close I’d been to never returning.
If I loved my teacher it’s probably fair to say that William was intrigued by Brianna Kraselnik, who was sixteen in her first spring with us. Her brother, David, had been sent to a military academy after he’d been in rehab, Brianna theoretically the good child. The single community activity that she took part in was the Library Cart Drill Team, her parents no doubt forcing her to do volunteer work for college admission. We were still for the most part full of appreciation for our mother’s kitschy enterprise, it never occurring to us that the project might have been an indictment of her character, or at least proof of her Alcoholism.
The art of Cart Drill at the basic level is to push the shelving carts to musical accompaniment. Sometimes you kick a leg out, or do a hip swivel, and as a team you make patterns as a marching band does, or you get a running start and glide with your feet hooked around the base, although that’s advanced work. Across the nation at that time there were eighty-four teams and counting, Cart Drill not something my mother herself invented. She was hoping we would one day enter the American Library Association Annual Cart Drill Competition in Chicago, and it was perhaps in order to achieve this goal that she invited Brianna Kraselnik, who was on the high school pom-pom squad, to choreograph a routine for us.
We began to rehearse in mid-April for the Memorial Day parade, our single performance of the year. All of our efforts riding on that forty-five-minute spectacle. We were an unusual team because we were not middle-aged librarians in seasonal appliquéd sweaters and gay men employees but a cross section of the community, which highlighted us, the bibliomaniac children. It’s customary for marchers in a parade to throw treats at the spectators but when we performed the crowds rained candy upon us. That’s how much our townspeople loved the team. We always kept our focus, every member serious and in sync, ignoring the great reward, the crowd laughing and whooping, Dubble Bubble and Tootsie Rolls filling the top shelves of our carts.
At our first rehearsal in the back room of the library Brianna made her entrance carrying her own enormous boom box, a canvas bag of CDs, and a clipboard. She set her load on the banquet table. Behold: Brianna Kraselnik in an aqua leotard with gathers between her breasts, those cupcakes sharply delineated. On the bottom half she wore gray sweatpants that were cut off at the knees and dingy pink leg warmers dribbling down around her ankles, around her soft leather shoes. We’d never seen any dancer’s outfit that was so ragged but also obviously professional. She was nothing like the aristocratic Mrs. Kraselnik, Brianna a girl with bovine eyes, the long lashes bristly with mascara, and she had a luscious red mouth, the puff of her lips something you wanted to try to pop, the way we did to Bubble Wrap, and there was the glossy hair all the way to her rump. When she appeared I was already practicing along the wall: forward, back, run, glide, an accomplished pro myself, a team member who was not showing off but rather refining her technique. William, sitting on the floor with a book in his lap was squinting at me and his eyebrows were raised, too, and his forehead furrowed, all of that musculature at work at once. As if to say, Really, Frankie?
Brianna didn’t hang back. She didn’t even wait for my mother to introduce her. “Okay, guys,” she said, clapping, approaching the whiteboard. “Listen up.”
Listen up? I turned to William, to make our gawking face. He, however, was gazing at our neighbor.
She smoothed her hair only to the base of her neck. “I’m Brianna Kraselnik, your choreographer. I know some of you have worked together before, so, wow, this is awesome, all of you showing up. And we’ve got some new members, right?” She smiled at Ramona Peterson, a third grader, and her friend Brittany Garner. Somehow, like a teacher with a magical list, Brianna knew our names and situations. Before she could say anything more the Bershek twins in their size seventeen tennis shoes came tromping into the room.
“Hola, ballerinas!” she called to them. “Just in time to show off your talents!”
The Bersheks were impossible to tell apart, both of them with sandy hair and glasses, both wearing the same style from head to toe, as if they had no interest in making it easy for anyone to know which was which. They always helped us with our hay, and it seemed a bizarre coincidence that Brianna knew boys that in summer were so important to us. “You,” she said severely, “you bad bad boys, you juvenile delinquents, better behave yourselves.” And then she squealed, a high-pitched mocking laugh, although what she was making fun of wasn’t clear.
One of the twins saluted, snapping his heels together.
“So, like I was saying,” she went on, clearing her throat and stroking her own irresistible hair again, “I’m super jazzed to have the opportunity to create your parade event and to work with you…athletes? Or whatever. A special shout-out to you, Mrs. Lombard, for inviting me here. Really, I just love this wacky formation biznass. Um, so, okay, I’ll show you what I’m thinking, give you”—she made her gigantic eyes bigger—“the grand design, and then we’ll do some warm-ups.”
The older Bushberger daughters were on Cart Drill, and so was Amanda and there were several adults, including Melvin Pogorzelski, my mother’s star patron, the librarian’s pet. Gloria would have been there if she hadn’t had her love attack, if she hadn’t had to leave us. We all nodded at Brianna, except for William. He seemed to have been struck by the lightning that was Brianna Kraselnik herself. A zap just for him.
She was saying, “Is there anyone who would like to demonstrate what this—thing is, for the newcomers, and maybe for review?”
“Good idea, Brianna,” my mother called from the sidelines.
Amanda’s hand shot up. I would have volunteered but a small something stopped me. I wasn’t sure that our choreographer was in fact trustworthy. My mother had invited our neighbors over for dinner back in the fall, but because of the Kraselniks’ school and hospital events, and our harvest, we had so far never gotten together. Cart Drill, then, was our first substantial acquaintance with Brianna. Her squealy voice, her mincing and mugging for the Bershek twins, made me wonder if deep down she didn’t think Cart Drill was retarded. That would be her word, one we weren’t allowed to use. And maybe William was arriving at that same suspicion, too, the reason he looked as if, should he be able to move, he might try to slip away.
I could see suddenly the retarded aspects of Cart Drill, the outsider’s perspective at once unsettling. There was the embarrassment of Mitchell, for one, the autistic patron, thirty-three years old, whom my mother enlisted to operate the boom box. During rehearsal he cradled the box in his arms as he rocked and groaned, taking the job of operating the PLAY/PAUSE button with the gravity it required. And there was dumpy old Melvin Pogorzelski, who was overly enthusiastic, too, sliding around in his stockinged feet, and clumsy Mrs. Johnson, always banging into us with her cart, and even my mother was mortification, The Director on a stepladder looking down on our formations as if she thought she were the Almighty.
But was Brianna mocking us, the team? When she described how the carts would be decorated with shiny silver strips that hung from the lip of the shelf, like a hula dancer’s skirt, she did seem sincerely excited. We girls all said, “Ahhhh!” There were fifteen carts that were strictly designated for the drill team, carts that could not be used for ordinary purposes. Shelvers, stay back. When Brianna—and not my mother—asked who would like to be on the decorating committee I couldn’t help thrusting my arm into the air, even before Amanda did. And I couldn’t help, either, my pride when Brianna said that I would be the girl hoisted on the shoulders of Melvin and Mrs. Bushberger, my cart minded by William when we got to, Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I will stay alive. The key message of the song. Amanda could never have been at the top of any pyramid because she was too chubby to be lifted.
When Brianna first played us the song, played “I Will Survive,” Melvin observed, “That is not the most patriotic number I’ve ever heard.”
Before our choreographer could defend her Memorial Day selection William said, “Yes, it is.” He spoke softly, so that everyone had to turn to see if in fact it was he who had made the comment. His face had turned completely red. He was looking at the floor. “It is,” he said again. “There’s no point to freedom—I mean, you can’t, um, have love if you’re not free.”
What in the world?
“OhmyGhaaaad,” Brianna said. “That, my friend, is so deep.” She shook her head in wonderment. “I can’t believe, Will, how incredibly, amazingly profound that is.”
Will? Did she already know him? From the middle school and high school bus stop? An acquaintance he’d never mentioned?
“KA-razy deep,” one of the Bersheks said.
“You, boy,” she barked, “no more out of you, you hear me?”
I was confused, still very much unsure if I liked Brianna, if I maybe wanted to tell my mother right then that I was retiring, but also I couldn’t quit when I was going to be the girl riding on the shoulders of the adults. By the end of the hour the Bersheks had decided Cart Drill was too difficult for them, they were too cloddy, and away they went into the library proper. “Oh, too bad,” Brianna said sarcastically. “Whatever will we do without them?” She slapped her hands to her cheeks, her lips in the O of astonishment. Some of the Cart Drillers laughed.
With the irritants gone we were able to get down to work. Although in the end the parade was a sensation, most everyone proud and exhilarated, I was not in that camp because of my private knowledge of Brianna’s character. Beyond her flirty behavior and her obscure jokes in our rehearsals, there was criminal conduct that I, and only I, happened to witness after our first practice, when the orchard came into full bloom.
This is what happened. On Blossom Day my mother always let William and me stay home from school. We were sent from the house in the morning with a basket of necessities, and told not to return until three thirty, the hours of the official school day. If the sky was softly blue and the sun’s radiance everywhere, no dark hole in which to hide, and the air still, nothing in it but bees working, blossom to blossom to blossom, the orchard lit with a snowy brilliance, and the grass plush and shiny, every green blade brimming with light, and here and there a carpet of violets, and swaths of beaming dandelions—then you yourself, you were dazed. You were bumbly and drunk, too, a once-a-year festivity.
On Blossom Day in that spring right after Philip’s visit, William and I as usual set up our camp in the hollow underneath a towering wild tree, a brute that produced a tart pulpy apple that was good for about a week in mid-September. We’d named it Savage Sauce-Burger—hilarious. The south orchard was fifteen acres of mature trees, most of them well over twenty feet tall, planted by our Great-Aunt Florence and Great-Uncle Jim in the era before dwarf and trellis trees were the rage. My father and Sherwood weren’t able to prune them all every year and some of them were impossibly overgrown, gothic subjects for a photographer rather than productive fruit trees. We had our books, the chessboard, cheese sandwiches, oranges, a thermos of lemonade, gingersnaps, trail mix, the usual goods for an expedition. William had his current Capsela robot masterpiece, half built, the motors and wires and bolts in his toolbox. But soon into our encampment it—or we—started to feel strange. We’d already stood close to smell the lacy petals, we’d lifted our faces to the sunshine, we’d talked about maybe playing pioneers, building a fire, roasting our own sandwiches on a stick. We’d discussed constructing a fort, with levels in the tree this time, a few different stories. We’d said maybe we should take a canoe ride.
Somehow, though, those old amusements didn’t seem interesting. Had they ever been interesting? I wondered what Mrs. Kraselnik was doing without me, wondered if Amanda was answering questions that should have gone to Mary Frances. William mentioned that Bert Plumly called being outside The Nature. As in, Don’t make me go to The Nature. That was just dumb, I said.
“It’s funny,” William said.
I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. I felt a tick in the fold of my ear, William removed it, we lit a match and watched it sizzle into a dark strand. Even that old satisfaction wasn’t fun. We weren’t just bored with the world; we were bored with ourselves, or we were hardly in our selves anymore. It was hard to tell what was going on. Maybe, if we could remember one little trick about how we used to be, we could get there, get back, as if we ourselves were a country we’d left.
We were on our blanket, scratching our arms and legs. William was reading Swallows and Amazons, one of his old bibles, with Calvin and Hobbes and Gary Larson as backup. We didn’t look like twins anymore. His hair remained light where mine had darkened, and his face was a longer version of itself now, his nose still turned up, and his teeth, recently so enormous and separate, had settled into his mouth, all of them somehow a modest size, no more spaces between. He took up the length of the blanket, about a foot more of him than I remembered from the previous year. He shouldn’t grow another millimeter, I thought; he’d done enough. His lips as usual were bunched into one pluckable bud, and his eyes, dark brown as the river.
Under our tree I took the time to make a vow. When we ran the orchard we wouldn’t work on the blossom holiday the way my father always did. No, we’d declare a feast day for our crew. Hot bubbling rhubarb pies would materialize, a haunch of a goat on a spit, loaves of braided bread, and a bucket of marshmallow fluff, all set on planks by the tool house. I thought about how Amanda and Adam were not allowed to stay home on Blossom Day, something we’d never discussed with them, Blossom Day our secret.
I was absorbed in the holiday menu when through the aisle of the orchard I saw a girl, a girl who looked like Brianna Kraselnik. And behind her came a boy—was it one of the Bershek twins? The arresting thing about this boy and girl in the orchard, however, wasn’t the sandy hair or the big eyes or the small glasses frames. It wasn’t that they were probably Brianna Kraselnik and one of the Bersheks. The arresting thing was the fact that each was wearing no clothing. No article of any kind. They both did have tennis shoes on their feet, but no socks.
They were floating along between the trees, coming in and out of my field of vision. The girl’s breasts were small, nothing much to notice not least because the feature that leapt out at you, that stunned your brain, was the huge patch of hair, a black version of the muskrat’s straw houses, in her private spot. That was all there was to see of her. I understood in that moment that underpants must have been the first invention of mankind because without them you would never look into your companion’s eyes or face, and therefore it would be impossible to invent other necessary tools or think up ideas. But wait, another horror. The penis of the twin swinging into view. I think I made a noise. It was—how long? I couldn’t say, couldn’t tell, it defied measurement. He walked as if he wasn’t aware of it, as if it required no concentration to have such an organ. He kept scratching his back, trying to get at a place that was no doubt a sting of some kind. I was too startled and certainly too amazed to notify William.
Some time passed. I began to wonder if I’d seen them. If they’d been real. They couldn’t be real because it was a very stupid idea and scary, too, to take your clothes off and walk around outside. No one would want to perform that stunt. The Lombard Orchard, a nudist colony, ha ha. But then why would I dream them up? Why give Brianna so much hair, far more than my mother had? Furthermore, I could never have imagined a penis that long. I wondered if Mrs. Kraselnik had told her daughter to take the day off from school, appropriating our holiday, maybe the reason they’d wanted to live next to an orchard in the first place. If the couple was real, where were they going? Did it occur to the exhibitionists that the Lombard men might be doing farmwork, that they might bump into the owners of the property? There was then this question: Do I tell Mrs. Kraselnik?
That was a stunner. Mary Frances, darling, how can I thank you for coming to me? Brianna has been a handful since the day we adopted her. Yes, it’s true, I’ve never told anyone that she is not my own—and that I’ve never loved her. My own real child would never do such a terrible thing, nor would she have so much of that…hair.
But again: Wait! Another shocking question was coming to me. Did Brianna know which Bershek twin was hers or were they interchangeable? I almost—almost right then cried out. Did the Bersheks even know which one of themselves was the real boyfriend?
William calmly went on reading while on my side of the blanket the earth kept quaking. The last shock: What if May Hill was in the orchard and saw them?
I said to William, “What do you want to do?” What I really meant was, We should get out of here. We had to leave in case Adam&Eve floated past again. And yet it was our property and so we should build a fort. We had every right to throw stones at the marauders. All my questions and knowledge were like beats within my head, a drumming. I started to pick the grass furiously without even knowing what my hands were doing, trying to outsmart the rhythm.
William muttered, “Reading is okay.”
“What what what what time is it?”
He looked at me, his book closing, his place lost. “What is the matter with you?”
I wanted to tell him everything, wanted especially to tell him about being held prisoner by May Hill, and how every time I saw her I became terrified, my heart always racing even if she was in the far distance. I wanted to cry when I thought of being trapped in her room, the event having grown more harrowing, so that I’d started to believe I’d been there for a few days and then a week had passed. But instead of describing my captivity I said, “I just saw Brianna and one of the Bershek twins naked.”
He was staring at me, ARE YOU CRAZY? I wondered if I was crazy, if I’d have to be carted away to an asylum. Why did the worst, the most unspeakable things happen only to me? William had not ever been the prisoner of May Hill—that was something I could guarantee. William did not “accidentally” lose the Geography Bee. He did not see naked teenagers strolling through the orchard. I rolled up into the blanket and shut my eyes, and not for the first time that spring I wanted to die.
Deep into the misery, unaccountably desiring more, in a terrible leap forward I saw that any number of disasters could destroy the crop that was here and now in its perfect beauty. There might be freeze or drought or hail or wind. The trees smashed and withered, the apples stunted or pocked.
William said, “I think I’m going to see if Pa will drive me to school for the afternoon.”
“What?” I said, turning my head so I wasn’t facedown in the grass. Neither one of us had ever thought to go to school for any part of Blossom Day. “What,” I inquired, “do you mean?” I’d forgotten all about Brianna. He was gathering up our things without saying a word, and then he unrolled my part of the blanket. Even as he worked to clear the campsite I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Next he was walking away with the basket and the bundle in his arms. When he was far down the path, when he was almost home I was still sitting there asking What?