Arcadia (3 page)

Okay, whispers Bit.

When the door clicks behind Regina, Hannah says, Nosy bitch.

Bit waits for the sourness in his stomach to pass, then says, What’s bitch?

A girl dog, Hannah says, and bites her lip and puffs out her cheeks with air.

Oh, Bit says. Pets are not allowed in Arcadia. Bit doesn’t ask what he knows in theory from picture books but longs to understand better: what, exactly, a dog is, or why people want to keep them. Jincy once nursed a baby bunny with soymilk for three days until her mother, Caroline, found it and made her leave it in the woods. When Jincy cried and cried, Caroline said with a shrug, Come on, Jin. You know personal property’s not allowed. Besides, you really want to enslave a fellow creature?

Petey wasn’t my slave, Jincy sniffled. I
loved
Petey.

Petey will grow up to be a big strong bunny hopping through the meadows, the way he’s supposed to, Caroline said firmly. The next day the squirmy pink thing was gone from the little pallet of leaves where Jincy had left it. Now the children make a game of scanning the underbrush for their tiny friend. Often someone runs shouting back to the Kid Herd, sure that they’ve seen Petey from the corner of an eye, rosy as a lump of flesh, swift in the brambles, a creature miraculous and tender, their shared secret.

Hannah has brought Bit in the predawn to the squat stone Bakery, and he wakes on the flour sacks in the corner. It is hot; loaves plumpen on the shelf. The flesh of the dough makes Bit hungry, makes something warm rise up in his sleep-swimmy head, and he creeps to where Hannah stands, hip against the mixer, talking to Regina and Ollie. Bit tugs Hannah down, and she bends absently, and he lifts her teeshirt, and latches his mouth to her breast.

Hannah slides her nipple away, pulls the shirt over her body, hugs it to her, pushes his cheek gently with her hand.

You’re too old for that, baby, she says, and stands.

The room trembles in Bit’s eyes. Ollie murmurs something about Astrid nursing Leif until he was eight, Regina says something and hands Bit a soft pretzel. Hannah says
Something-something-can’t,
but Bit doesn’t hear her words exactly, his sorrow a too-loud wind in his ears.

When it’s too dark to work, Abe comes home. His coat and overalls and workshirt shed sawdust. When his gloves come off, his hands are nicked and chapped. During dinner, Hannah yawns. Bit and Abe can see the tiny man bobbing in the cavern of her throat. She says, I’m bushed. Sometimes she washes her face and brushes her teeth with baking soda before she falls asleep, sometimes she doesn’t. The nights are long. Abe picks Bit up and reads aloud whatever he’s studying at the time (
New Politics, Anarchy and Organization, Mad
magazine). Bit can pick out sentences, can follow along the swoops of emotion in Abe’s voice, can sound out headlines to himself. Parts of the world click into shape, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. But the puzzle is alive; it grows; new pieces appear for him to fit together faster than he can gather them in his mind.

He fights sleep to think about it all. His father washes dishes and fetches water from the stream so they don’t have to in the morning, and when he unbuttons his shirt with heavy hands, he falls, already sleeping, into bed.

There is, Bit knows, what happens on the surface, and there is what pulls beneath. He thinks of standing in a river current, the wind strong in the opposite direction. Even in the happiest times—Cockaigne Day in the middle of summer, Blessing Day at the end of the year, the Harvest Festival, the spontaneous gigs—even during all that dancing and happy arguing, the Slap-Apple, the banquets, in the corners there always sit a few muscled young men with a badness in their eyes. There are murmurs when they come to Arcadia,
dodger, four-eff, rather . . . jungles . . . bayonet babies?
There is old Harriet, whose braless breasts waggle at her navel, who hoards food under her bed (
Poor thing,
he overheard someone once say,
watched her parents starve to death in the siege of Leningrad
). There is Ollie, one of the original Caravaners, who worked alone for the first two years to reinforce the secret tunnel between the Octagonal Barn and Arcadia House with sheets of metal, stocking it with barrels of water, canned goods, matches, tarps, iodine salt. Ollie has the pale softness of a salamander down by the stream; sometimes, he jerks and blinks and goes silent in the middle of a sentence.

The badness even spreads, at times, to the kidlets. Bit won’t go into the fruit room in the Free Store, despite all those delicious wrinkling apples in their barrels. Someone put up an enormous black-and-white poster with a glowering man in moustachios. There are words Bit is far too frightened to piece out beyond
Big Brother;
and even when adults go in, they look at the poster and come out fast.

Hannah and Abe share the same nightmare from their childhood: a dim room with a fat woman who stands before them, a siren overhead, a scramble under the desks, a white flash. These dreams have been catching at Hannah often recently, spiderwebs tightening the more she tries to escape. Most days, when the first sun melts itself across the Bread Truck linoleum, the panic from the dream slowly vanishes, leaving an oily taste behind to taint the air.

But this morning, Bit wakes alone, heart racing. The icicles in the window are shot with such red light of dawn that Bit goes barefoot over the snow to pull one with his hand. Inside again, he licks it down to nothing, eating winter itself, the captured woodsmoke and sleepy hush and aching cleanness of ice. His parents sleep on. All day, the secret icicle sits inside him, his own thing, a blade of cold, and it makes Bit feel brave to think of it.

He watches his parents kiss goodbye. Their lips slide from each other’s cheeks, and as they turn, Abe pats the level on his belt with a hand and Hannah frowns at something Astrid calls out, waiting on the other side of the Quad with heaps of laundry in her hands. A shock; Bit hasn’t understood until now; his parents are vastly different from one another. There is only one Abe, beamy and talky and gathering his energy from
things,
Arcadia House made solid; but there two Hannahs. Summer Hannah is going away, the one who loved people, who gathered the children’s boots while they slept to paint the snouts of animals upon them, pigs and horses and birds and frogs, according to their wearers. His laughing mother, the loud one: in a place where all bodily functions are matter-of-fact, where even in solemn moments there are whole brass sections of flatulence, her gas is legendary for its thunder. La Pétomane, she nicknamed herself, with a flushed half-pride. That Hannah is as strong as the men. When someone yells “Monkeypower!” to get help with a mud-stuck truck or with digging sand from the creek for the Showerhouse concrete, she shows up first, works the longest, her back under the sleeveless shirt as taut and muscled as any of the men’s. That is the Hannah who cracks jokes under her breath until the ladies around her snortle; the one who shuts the curtains on the Bread Truck some days and opens her small, secret trunk that she isn’t supposed to keep, all possessions in Arcadia held in common. Then she pulls a delicate tablecloth out, her great-grandmother’s Belgian lace. She pulls teacups out, porcelain tender as skin, ten oil miniatures and a mahogany case of silver with five different kinds of forks, all vined with tiny lilies. She sets it up and makes a mint tea and orange-peel cookies with smuggled white sugar, and Bit and she have a tea party together all afternoon long.

Ridley Sorrel Stone, one chews with one’s mouth closed! Summer Hannah says in the acid voice of her childhood deportment teacher. One puts one’s napkin on one’s lap! She and Bit clink teacups solemnly, accomplices.

But this Hannah is burrowing inside a new one who has let the winter in. She has begun to stare at the walls and allows her braids to unravel. She forgets to start supper. Her golden skin fades to a pallor, blue bruises press under her eyes. This Hannah looks at Bit as if she is trying to see him from a very great distance.

Bit is chopping wood with Titus Thrasher up by the Gatehouse. He gathers the chips that spurt off the ax and puts them in a bucket for kindling.

You want to talk about what’s bothering you? says Titus, and Bit says a low No.

They watch Kaptain Amerika tool by in a croaky station wagon he has taken from the Motor Pool. The Trippie is going into Summerton for his psychotherapy, which the state pays for. Many in Arcadia are on food stamps or disability. When there’s been a long spell without new people to put money in the pot, welfare keeps them going. Kaptain Amerika was an English professor, but turned on too many times and messed up his brain. Now he sharpens his long beard into two points and wears a sarong made of an American flag. Bit had once heard Astrid defend him: Yeah, he is a creepo, this is so, she’d said. But he has his moments of lucidity. Bit supposes she’d meant the moments when Kaptain Amerika will shout: Uncle Sam wants
me.
Or,
Nixon
is the albatross!

How come he’s called Kaptain Amerika? Bit says, watching the blue exhaust from the station wagon curl and fade. Not Professor Merton?

Titus leans on the ax handle. He is steaming with sweat, his undershirt the color of a teastained mug. No woman lives with Titus to wash his things, so they never get clean, unless Hannah or another woman steals them when he is out. He smells like a turnip gone bad. He says, People get to choose who they want to be here. Part of the deal. Near everybody’s got a nickname they gave to themselves. People come here to become what they want to be. Tarzan. Wonder Bill. Saucy Sally. He flushes when he says the last name, and Bit studies his friend in silent wonder.

A car pulls up the long dirt road. Titus steps to the gate, mopping his face with a bandanna. Four young men with fringed leather jackets and cameras in their hands pour out, slamming the car doors behind them. Hey, man, says one, and Titus says, No, no, no. You’re welcome if you’re serious about living here, man, but you’ve got to respect our privacy if not.

Oh. Well, we’re on the paper at the college in Rochester? says one of the boys. And you don’t have a phone. We thought we might interview Handy?

I dig his music, says a pipsqueak with red ears. He’s the American Original.

The four grin, sure that admiration is their ticket inside.

Sorry, says Titus.

Come on, man. We’re hip, says another. He hefts a thirty-pound sack from the trunk. We brought some yams for the Free Store. Just let us poke around? We’ll be gone after dinner.

A hardness comes over Titus’s face. We’re not zoo animals, he says. You can’t bribe us with peanuts.

Yams, the boy says.

Titus swings the ax to his shoulder and strides closer to the boys. They falter, break apart, only one holding his ground. At times, Titus has to be violent to keep the gawkers out. Bit is afraid to see his gentle friend turn into the ugly stranger he sometimes needs to be. He runs away. All afternoon, Bit stays in the woods, poking at icicles and frozen puddles until he is too cold to hold off going home to the Bread Truck any longer. When he comes in and puts his fingers on the back of her neck, Hannah shudders awake.

Abe comes home shouting, the Children’s Wing is roofed! It’s plumbed. It’s insulated and airtight. The babies’ll have a place to live!

Bit dances, and Hannah stretches to her full height, releasing her warm smell from her sweater and murmuring, That’s lovely.

In the morning, sweet with snow, a train of women with mops and buckets walks up to Arcadia House. They will scrub and polish and paint it all, redo floors, re-plaster. Hannah goes with them. She is shaky on her feet, a cage of bones.

Bit, honey, Hannah had urged, Go play with the Kid Herd in the Pink Piper, but he said No, no, no, no, no. He hadn’t seen the house since the big push on the day that Handy went off on his concert tour. At last, Hannah lets Bit come along. He sits in the little Red Wagon with the vinegar and rags, a box of sponges on his lap. Hannah pulls him over the sludgy ground, falling behind the others. The women call to each other in the sharp air; they laugh. The men on the Arcadia House roof stand up like woodchucks in a field to watch the women come through the terraced apple orchards. They wolf-whistle. Abe makes great arcs with his arms above his head.

But when the women march through the courtyard and into the Schoolroom, they go silent. There are vast begrimed windows; a curious, squat old woodstove; coat hooks that range from tall to tiny. The heaps of desks are scalloped with rainbow fungi. The walls shudder with cobwebs disturbed by their entry. Someone long before had camped in the middle of the floor and burnt a great black pit into the planks. The plaster of the ceiling has come off in spurts and chunks, baring the raw lath and, over the ghosts of antique calligraphy on the slate board, someone has scraped a huge
Fuck
with a knife. Bit spells it out in his head, says the word under his breath. The women are still, wide-eyed.

Then plain Dorotka with her granny glasses puts down her bucket and rolls up her sleeves. She ties her long gray braids around her head, crowning herself. Ladies, she calls out, disturbing the fur on the wall so that it shifts and floats, loose as hair under water. We have us a job, don’t we, now.

Don’t we now, don’t we, the women softly echo.

Bit is given a rag, sat at a desk, told to scrub, but he watches the women sweep the walls with their brooms until wigs of cobweb fall slowly.

He can, he finds, walk out unnoticed.

In the hall, he hears the pounding of the men somewhere. There is music, something familiar, Hendrix on a radio but warped by the distance and the walls and the beats of the hammers until, all together, the music and the cleaning and building sounds blend into a snowstorm, all winds and rattles.

At the end of the hall, a built-in seat cowers below a small window. He tries to climb, but the cushion collapses when he touches it. He flees the upswell of dust, a snow of mold and dead spiders, goes down a darker place, turns to where the wall goes jagged with stairs. He climbs them. Some treads are missing; he leaps these, and when he does, something moves in the gap below him, and he scrambles, up, away, the terror bitter in his throat, his heart jigging in his chest, onto the next floor. It smells of pine and sawdust, the fresh beams of the new roof above, but he must skirt great jagged holes in the floor. He creeps along, rounds a bend. One door opens as he passes and he looks inside. It is a vast and dark room, the Proscenium, he remembers someone calling it. A tarp stretches over the ceiling where there once had been full sky.