So, one minute we were children in the orchard, and the next it was decided by someone, somehow, that William and I were too old to share a room. We were eleven and twelve. I couldn’t believe it, the bunk beds ripped apart, the steel web that held his mattress no longer my nighttime ceiling, my sky. He swept up everything he loved in our room, all the Lego embedded in the carpet, every tangled wire, every connector and specialized wrench, all his comics, his books, his long tube socks, his two plastic banks heavy with quarters, and he moved down the hall to my mother’s office. I stood by the bed, holding on to the post after the top bunk was removed, feeling as if the injury to the furniture had been done to me, as if something of myself had been lopped off. He wouldn’t look in my direction as he packed up his possessions, the Tintin compendium stacked on top of The Complete HyperCard Handbook.
“Don’t go,” I managed on his last load.
He was standing in the door with a laundry basket filled with fat white pipes, a dismantled radio, and a samovar-type thing he’d taught me was a carburetor. “You can spread out,” he suggested, nodding his head at my doll junk and dozens of pulpy books about the babysitters.
“Don’t—” I tried again.
“Francie, don’t be silly.” My mother swooping in, offering up her idea of comfort. “He’s just down the hall. He’s ten steps away.”
“Don’t go,” I said once more.
“He needs more space”—the twentieth time for the explanation. “And you do, too.”
“I don’t. I have plenty.”
William turned the basket lengthwise to get it through the door, and out of the room he went.
That night it was impossible to even close my eyes with so much light, so much air above me. I had curled up by William’s bed in his new room but my mother had flapped me away, the arms of her black sweater like wings. “Good night, William, good night!” I called through those wings. “Good night,” I cried, “good night.”
“Okay, Imp,” he had to say, “good night.”
There was nothing to be done about the situation but wait until the house was still and take those ten steps back down the hall, pillow and blanket in hand.
His arm was draped over the side of the bed, William now so close to the floor, his knuckles in the pile of the rug. I was still wearing zip-up fuzzy one-piece pajamas all the long way down to the enormous plastic feet, mine in red, William’s, before he’d forsaken them, in blue. Already the room smelled of him, of us, I couldn’t tell which part of our smell he’d taken with him. It seemed important to let him know that I would never ever leave him, and also that I was fine, I was near, a pull of his toe before I covered his bare leg. He did lift his head, his lids fluttering, his eyes open for an instant. I lay myself down in the corner of the hard floor, the smallest bare place between the shelf and the desk, no crib for my head. But it was all right now because his breathing, his adenoidal inhalations, that syncopated stuffiness, was my breathing, too, and mine his. And so we could safely sleep.
Did I not know, had I not been able to see that the separation, the long slow pull, had begun years before there was fuzz on his upper lip? What a stealth maneuver he had to make, that perhaps he was making deliberately, his quietness and his absorption in his projects a step-by-step, a careful tiptoe, past me. It was our first computer, a Macintosh—funny, the name of an apple—that started the marching of time.
Nineteen ninety: The computer arrived in a white carton, the cardboard itself shiny, polished, and there on the side the logo that should have been ours, the psychedelic apple with the smooth bite out of it, and the single leaf on top. It was my mother’s outrageous gift to my father, something he didn’t think they could afford. He was trying to refuse it, attempting to carry it back into the hall from the kitchen, but William was obstructing his path, arms flailing, legs doing a jig, crying, “P-p-please Papa. P-please. Maps and charts—charts!” He yanked on my father’s hand, wouldn’t let go. “You’ll see, graphs, you like graphs, and charts and maps. You have to—you can do maps, you can map every tree, you can—” He put his finger in his mouth, bit down, the dream so near. William, five years old, having witnessed the automation of the library card catalog, was the prophet.
My father said, “William! It’s all right.”
“No, no, maps and charts!”
How to explain that my father could track weather patterns, he could invent weather patterns, he could organize the family archives, he could get rid of the ledger book, he could use email, a recent household invention, he could precisely record the spray program—how to make all of that clear before it was too late?
My father said, “It doesn’t seem fair, Nellie, if we have a computer, and Sherwood doesn’t.”
“He can hallucinate one,” my mother replied. “He can build a system from a bushel basket and a piece of copper tubing.”
My father said, “This isn’t something we really can—”
“Please!” William screeched. Never in his life had he needed anything so urgently.
They carefully unwrapped it together, the decision not yet firmly made, or so my father thought. They plugged it in. William took the chair in front of the small square screen, the 512K whirring like a knife sharpener. In the glow of the soft gray light he clicked on the mouse, and down, down he fell into the infinite world.
He had Adam as his forever friend, just as Amanda was for me, and in addition there was Bert Plumly, who lived in the subdivision beyond the south end of the woods. The Plumly house may have seemed the perfect idea of a house to William, two stories with white siding, blue shutters with cutout hearts, and window boxes, and in the back sliding glass doors out to the deck. And on that deck there was a hot tub, a gas grill as long as our canoe, and an iron table with a white-and-red-striped umbrella, the Plumlys at the ready for relaxation. In the kitchen Ma Plumly served Pac-Man mac and cheese in blue plastic bowls and for a treat Dr Pepper in frosted green glasses with pink bendy straws, and for dessert she put the gluey Rice Krispie squares on holiday napkins. Also there were carrot sticks.
The rooms in that paradise opened up, one to the next, the carpet starting in the family room right where the faux-oak flooring of the kitchen stopped, the fans overhead keeping the cool air moving across the different areas that were empty except for the sofas, the chairs. When the Plumlys got tired of outdoor recreation they could enjoy the offerings of their satellite dish, the screens of their many televisions growing larger by the year, like children, until the one in the living room was nearly the length of the far wall. The poor Lombards had the single old TV that got two channels, Mary Frances and William dependent on the kindness of the neighbors. Despite the Plumly riches aboveground, the boys chose the bunker, everything important, as it turned out, taking place down the basement. That was where they lived, where, hour after hour, they sat at the long counter with the two computers, one for Bert and one for his older brother, Max. When William went to the Plumlys for an overnight he took his own terminal, his hard drives, a bag of cables, boxes of disks, and his office chair.
Ma Plumly, passing through the dark cavity in those early days of the Gaming Epoch, on her way to the laundry room, would occasionally suggest an alternative activity. “A game of basketball?” she’d say with little conviction. “Dad fixed the hoop.” As if all that stood between the boys and exercise was a repair of the court. “It’s a nice day out there.” They’d look up at her with an expression so blank she felt compelled to remind them of her identity. “It’s your mother speaking. Melissa R. Plumly. Did you want to have a little lunch?”
“In…a…minute,” one of them might say. Hours later, finally registering hunger, the three of them, William, Bert, Max, pounded up the stairs. I was occasionally in the family room amusing Crystal Plumly, a girl three years my junior, she and I playing Pretty Pretty Princess and watching Oprah. The boys sat at the island, waiting for Ma Plumly to produce the blue bowls. While she busied herself they tracked the robotic vacuum cleaner spinning through the living area, the disk bumping into the wall, the red light blinking, the boys narrating in Gregorian tones, “I meant to do that, I am not an idiot, who put this frigging table leg here.”
At the library Ma Plumly said to my mother, “At least the boys aren’t into drugs.”
“Or women,” my mother said.
Their faces, those boys, were puffy, and they wore heavy canvas pants several sizes too big, the bottoms frayed from dragging along the ground, their black T-shirts with a human-type man on the front but no irises in the eyes.
There was the seminal night when William, twelve or so, went to Bert’s house, my father shuttling him over there with all the usual requirements in the back of the van, including his new chair, an ergonomic wonder he’d gotten for his birthday. Max had acquired a game called Posse through a quasi-legal file share, a new game that he handed off to Bert and William, the two of them playing until eight in the morning, tipping over to sleep on the nubbly carpet for forty-five minutes and waking to continue. They knew their lives were forever changed, the thing that would mark them arrived.
In order to develop their skills they had to play Posse starting in the late afternoon and going through the night, William abruptly nocturnal. They were soon recruited by a kid in Iceland to be on his most excellent team and not long after—so dedicated and talented were they—positions of responsibility were conferred upon them. They were in the lineup to be Posse Executives, to someday be the CEOs of their own teams, hiring players, assessing their gifts, firing them if necessary. What, really, Ma Plumly said, could be a better education?
Through July and August she as usual went down the basement, laundry basket in hand, walking slowly past the bank of computers to see if anything had changed. Always the virtual missiles were sighted on metal-plated hulks looming in the bleak distance, each live boy wearing a headset, speaking in a new language to similarly afflicted boys out in the ether.
“It’s a nice day,” Ma Plumly said in her vain attempt. She’d bring them liquids. She made cupcakes in pastel fluted papers. “You do need fuel,” she’d remind them. When she spilled some milk she used one of their Posse swear-words, shouting theatrically, “Shazbot!” She sprang on the puddle with a dishcloth, “Gotta go fast”—another of their memes. When I said Shazbot at the dinner table William looked up from his hamburger and told me, “You did not just say that.” I was not even allowed to speak his language.
In those months I most often played with Amanda, Gloria sometimes taking us to swim in a nearby lake, Gloria also making do without William. She had returned to us in June, right away taking up her Gloria things, gardening and knitting and working and talking about apples so that we soon forgot she’d ever had to go to Colorado. At the end of summer, William did without question come with us when we went to The Hills, we called it, the annual outing of the Lombards, the spree that took place in the briefest pause between the early apples and the beginning of the Macintosh harvest. Amanda and Adam, Frankie and William got in the back of the Ford pickup, Sherwood and my father in the dented cab, and over the path through the woods we shrieked when we bounced, and otherwise Amanda and I sang, bursting our lungs, William and Adam shouting at nothing, at the world passing. The loggers from the Forest Management Program had made a road right through to The Hills, which abutted our land and was owned by a gravel company, the mining far off in the future. Each grassy hill had been formed by the glacier in the last Ice Age, during the Pleistocene, Sherwood explained, the scooped-out valley a natural amphitheater.
Dolly and my mother met us at the highest peak, The Top Of The Earth, with the picnic baskets. Before lunch Sherwood produced his best invention: waxed cardboard boxes pulled apart with a little curl on the end, that was it, the sleds so simple. He always went down the hill a few times in order to pave the way, so that by our turn the trip to the bottom, with a great push, was as slick as a luge run, we were sure of it, holding tight to the lip of our cardboards, screaming our joyful fright. Sherwood and my father went down, too, behaving just as they must have when they were cousins together, when they were the boys of summer. In those hours it was as if the Lombard partnership had not yet occurred. My mother and Dolly watched from under the lone burr oak at The Top Of The Earth, Dolly relaying the antics of her siblings, twelve of them, never a dull moment in the Muellenbach clan. Nellie lay on her side with her elbow crooked to support her head and laughed and laughed.
I was at the bottom of the hill, tumbling off my cardboard, looking up at the mothers when it struck me that they never went to war. We all knew that it was fine for the fathers to blow up, we expected their biannual arguments, but the mothers of course would never speak harshly to one another, never show their true colors. In our kitchen Nellie Lombard might say fond, somewhat disparaging things about Dolly, or make jokes about her endless talking, but Dolly would never know about my mother’s unkindness. I sat down at the bottom of the hill with those thoughts that seemed pleasant, the idea of the mothers all of a sudden baring their fangs and shouting. Such a scene could be enjoyable and not at all frightening because I knew it would never happen. When I climbed back up the hill they were naturally still laughing.
That summer we were coming home along the path in the woods when who should we see but Gloria and a friend she’d made from her knitting club, two women in wide-brimmed straw hats, both in long-sleeved shirts and loose trousers. They looked like old-fashioned ladies, women who might find just the place to set up their easels to glorify the scene. When we stopped for them it was Gloria who told us the news. “The princess,” she said, “has been in a terrible, terrible car accident.”
“Princess Diana,” the friend clarified.
We hung over the side of the truck while Gloria told the story of the princess and her boyfriend tearing around Paris, how the princess had left her children and her country to take her own vacation with the foreigner. We all rode quietly after that, a princess who might die, Gloria so shaken she could not say more after the critical details. When we got back to the farm we learned that May Hill had gotten the tractor stuck in the thick mud by the goat shed, May Hill, who never made mistakes, and not only that, the sheep had found an opening in the fence, the entire flock not ambling but galloping up into the east orchard, lambs and mothers, heading into the great wide open. We couldn’t leave the farm for even three hours without the tractor getting stuck, the sheep escaping their yard, and a princess suffering an accident.
It was the next spring when my mother took Bert and William to a hotel outside Washington, DC, for the First Annual Posse Convention. The boys were unbearably excited to meet the actual players on their teams, which meant they said less than usual in our company, the two of them scraping along the driveway from the bus in their gangbanger pants, bottled up with their great secret life and times.
My father and I thought about them somewhat at first while they were away in Washington but after no more than an hour had passed we became unexpectedly happy on our own. Over the four days we got the garden planted and we did twenty loads of manure, cleaning the lower barn, the sheep dung compacted into sheaves so that instead of digging at them it was an archaeological matter of peeling away the layers with the fork. We bleached the area to cleanse the place of parasites, and afterward we stood in the doorway admiring our work. We hardly had to speak to understand each other.
In the evenings we leaned against the sink and for dinner had menus such as chocolate malts and saltines with melted cheese. No big production necessary.
Back during the four–five split I sometimes used to imagine my mother not dead exactly but removed, so that Mrs. Kraselnik could adopt me. During the Posse Convention I recalled the pleasure of my mother being gone, the idea of it. I wasn’t wife of course to my father but I didn’t feel like daughter, either. He asked me questions as if he valued my expertise, as if all along on a different track I’d always been his partner, and only now had surfaced in this old but new dimension. “Where should we spread this load, Marlene?” he’d ask me as he was heading off to fertilize a field or part of the orchard. At the sink he’d say, “What varieties do you think we should graft this spring? What should we have more of? What do you like best?”
We did now and again bring up the convention, nine hundred boys in the hotel ballroom, boys and their pizzas, boys electrified by Mountain Dew. My father said, “No more hip bone connected to the hip bone in the electronic age. No more thighbone connected to the thighbone. Homo sapiens, good-bye. A new race is coming.” He trolled around in his glass for the last dregs of his malt. “The ennobling future, I guess.”
We thought of my mother in the hotel on her king-size bed, lying around reading, maybe ordering room service, the only Lombard who didn’t work on the farm. I said to my father, “If Mama was a Posse player what would her name be?”
“Savage Librarian,” he said without having to think.
We had to hold our stomachs to laugh. Next we sat at the table and talked about all the work we would get done the next day, on Sunday, and we reviewed the good works we’d done that day, too. We talked until the candle burned down. It was as if talking at the table and sleeping were one and the same, and by and by we climbed the stairs trailing words and went to bed.