Arcadia (6 page)

At last, Bit washes his hands carefully and brushes his teeth three times with baking soda. He kneels behind his mother’s pillow. He cups her cheeks. Slowly, he lowers his mouth to hers, kissing with all he has within him, pressing his lips hard against hers until he can feel the shape of her teeth behind her lips and taste the bad tang of her breath.

She doesn’t awaken when he lifts his head away. He takes his hands back sadly. This is what he’d feared. Bit is not the one. He is not her prince.

The women boil down the sap in a water heater Tarzan welded into a huge double boiler, and the air all over Arcadia smells sweet and a little burnt at the edges. Bit can almost taste the sugar when he puts out his tongue. One morning, when Sweetie brings the Kid Herd over the fresh drifts of snow to the Sugarshack, Mikele and Suzie, who have boiled all night long, are giddy, and paint the soft snow with streaks of syrup. The syrup sinks as it cools, and when they fish it out, it has hardened into candy.

Don’t tell Astrid, says Suzie. She hacks the syrup taffy into pieces and hands them out to the kids. His piece is so sweet that Bit gags, but to not hurt their feelings he swallows it anyway and pretends to want more.

Abe’s clothes stink with sweat and sawdust; the men are finished with the entire roof. Tomorrow, the joints of Abe’s hands won’t have ice in them all the time, and Bit won’t startle when he accidentally brushes them in his sleep. Tomorrow, Abe will start to put in bathrooms and plumbing to the Eatery, and the huge heap of salvaged copper pipes down at the Motor Pool will shrink to nothing.

When we’re in Arcadia House,
people say all the time now, longing writ on their faces. Always, the dream of
when
. Things will be better, we will be warmer, people won’t argue, we will send extra aid into the world, we will start the publishing company, nobody will have vitamin D deficiencies, the kidlets will go to school, the midwives will be on hand, the bears won’t come out of the woods and ransack the garbage pails and scatter the unwashed diapers or Menstru-fleeces all across the Quad, there will be no loos.

Muffin, who once lived with her mothers in an apartment in Albany, tries to describe toilets to the kids: You turn a knob, she says, and water gushes out and swallows up your poop.

Helle begins to cry. Like a monster, she sobs. It eats your shit!

The others sigh and shift away, as they usually do when Helle cries. But Bit goes to her and hugs her to him, this squishy hard girl, all elbows and pudge. At first she pulls back, but when he lets go of her, she sinks against him. She is bigger than he is, but sometimes he thinks she’s younger, even, than the toddlers. She is strange. She smells like a vanilla bean. Bit always feels a little sick for her.

Not
like a monster, says Muffin with disdain. It’s like the loos. But it doesn’t stink and isn’t cold and there aren’t spiders and the Sanitation Crew doesn’t have to pump them, and you don’t have to spread lye. You just turn the knob and it goes away.

Where’s away? says Leif.

I don’t know, says Muffin.

They look at one another, thinking. At last, Erik, who is eleven, says, I think the ocean. Yes, they all agree, away must be the ocean, which Bit pictures as the Pond on a windy day, people in strange outfits waiting on the opposite side: women in kimonos and wooden shoes, men in paddy hats and dashikis like Muhammad’s, little flotillas of shit rushing over the surface toward them, scrap-paper sails and all.

As they sleep, a cloud dumps snow upon them. Ersatz Arcadia has become a smooth pretty village of white, poked with playful, smoking chimneys, like the old-timey picture in Hannah’s book on Russian serfs. Today, again, Hannah doesn’t get up. Every part of her is filmy with oils. She murmurs and grabs Bit and pulls him in gently under the blankets, against her warmth. When he is very still and breathes with her and drifts off to sleep in her wake, he sees pieces of her dreams: a gray street that Bit has never seen, a tree with coppery bark, a fountain under oaks draped in dusk, a huge black bird with its beak cracked to a red tongue. Deeper, and he is in the belly of a closet and something soft brushes his temple and voices are raised outside. There is a dinner table with many forks and spoons laid out in rows and a tiny silver bowl into which a white hand dabbles. There is a return to something private, slippery, that tips and spills. When he wakes, he is drenched with sweat but shivering.

Midmorning is blindingly bright. His friends are rolling yarn balls from unwearable sweaters, and the Pink Piper smells like sweaty oatmeal. When Bit passes the Free Store with the Kid Herd, out for what Sweetie calls their Afternoon Constitutional, he sees Kaptain Amerika on the porch. The stars in the Trippie’s sarong flap in the wind. He beckons Bit close with a bony finger.
Inside my ear a bed she laid. And there she slept. And all became her sleep,
he murmurs with his sour breath. Rilke. My translation, of course, he says. Bit doesn’t understand. The Kid Herd has moved past the Store, and Bit runs to catch up and, safe again, looks back to see the old Trippie gazing at him. The Kaptain’s words tumble over one another in his head all afternoon, like a small room packed with toddlers.

Jincy’s mother, Caroline, is gone. She has left her things and run away. And though Jincy weeps and her father, Wells, spits about abandonment and puts Caroline’s clothes in the Free Store, Bit knows what happened.

This morning, when there was pewter frost on the grass, Bit came out for a pee and saw a huge white bird on the roof of Jincy’s bus, bright in the predawn. He saw it spread its wings and turn, once. It flapped. Then Jincy’s mother heaved herself up into the air and flew away.

Jincy comes over to stay at Bit’s, to sleep in his sleeping bag with him, to squeeze him until she feels better. He goes limp and bears it.

At night: Sweetness. Hey. Hey, sweet girl, wake up.

Umph. What.

I’m worried about you. Regina tells me you haven’t been going to the Bakery these past few days. Dorotka says you’re not going up to Arcadia House with the women in the afternoon.

I’m just tired. You know how winter always gets me down.

Yeah. Yeah. But this seems worse than usual. Are there days you’re not getting out of bed?

Hannah says nothing.

It’s just. I know with your dad and the other thing you’re pretty sad. But, I mean, I’m working my ass off. It’s already March and the plumbing still has another week and then we’ll start in on the rest, and we’re already behind, and in that last letter of Handy’s he was talking about cutting out Oregon so they all could get back here the week before we have to plow, and we can use all the Monkeypower we can get so that we’re all done before they get back.

Nothing. Bit’s own heartbeat in his ears.

Sweet girl? Don’t want to talk?

Only the trees shaking outside.

Okay. You take your time. Take a week or so, sleep it off. But I’d like you up and at ’em next week. Okay?

His mother’s even breath.

An emergency. The Showerhouse water heater is dead. Abe takes Bit with him. When they get down to the low hut by the Pond, there is no hot water left and the Thursday bathers look on, miserable, soap in their chilled hair.

Abe must examine the hookups under the tank, and Titus and Hiero and Tarzan help move it. Someone gasps, someone screams: mounded under where it had stood, they find a coil, a ball of snakes, hibernating rattlers.

Abe’s muscles are quick, and with the heavy heels of his boots, he smashes until blood splatters, a great deal of it, bits of snake everywhere. Bit wants to bend down and touch one of the rattles that sticks above the gore, delicate as a mushroom. But Abe picks him up and thrusts him at Titus. Just as someone begins to shout in horror, Titus goes back into the night with Bit, his long-legged giant’s stride impossibly fast over the ground. Hannah doesn’t awaken when Bit crawls into bed with her. In his sleep, the wind blowing through the forest becomes Hannah’s breath, becomes the embers falling in the woodstove, becomes a distant roar.

Sweetie outfits the kids in their anoraks and boots and takes them to the Pond, which has finally, this late, frozen solid. They wait for Bit, shaking the Bread Truck on its axles until he reluctantly comes out. It is a tearing in him to leave Hannah behind. But when he is in the fresh cold air, he feels scrubbed. All morning, they slip and slide across the ice in their boots. They scream. Hysteria smacks them in the gullet. They form whiplash lines, where one of the bigger kids, Leif or Erik or Muffin or Molly or Fiona, is the pivot, the little kids at the end. Bit, one of the littlest, littler even than Pooh, who is only three and a girl, is released and flies, over and over and over across the ice on his feet, then his knees, and into the pillowy snowbanks at the edges.

The sun peeps out sporadically, and when it does the ice glows green. The trees that rim the Pond dazzle with icicles that clatter together when wind blows, that make a sound like chimes when they fall.

Helle forms fat snow angels connected like paper dolls around the Pond. It takes her hours. Jincy and Muffin spin until they’re dizzy. Leif finds a great fish frozen with his snout to the surface, and talks to it in a low voice. The babies who can walk, Felipe and Ali and Sy and Franklin, dabble their mittens in the snow, toddle and fall in the drifts. The boys knock each other down. Astrid and the pregnant teenagers Saucy Sally and Flannery bring grilled soy-cheese sandwiches and thermoses of chamomile tea down for the kidlets, and take the babies home. The bigger kids are refueled for another hour when, one by one, they drop.

Bit can feel the ice cold and hard through his snow clothes. He feels his body washed clean by the winter, by the hard good work of playing. When he enters the Bread Truck, his mother is at the table with Abe.

Abe’s eyes are red-rimmed, and he gives Bit a kiss on the head before he takes off Bit’s jacket and snow pants and hat and gloves. I’m sorry for what happened last night, Little Man, he says. I’m sorry you had to see it. It was instinct, that’s all. I never, ever meant to kill anything, even snakes. You know it’s wrong to kill. It’s really bad Karma.

Bit pats his father’s face, forgiving him. He is shy near his mother, scans the air around her head. Hey, baby, she says, and pulls him onto her lap. He gives a little hiss of pain through his teeth, and she sets him down again, takes off his jeans. Oh, my God, she says. Oh, my God, baby, what happened to your legs?

He doesn’t recognize them at first, they’re so purple with bruises. His knees are also raw, skinned bloody. He shrugs, and she kisses each one gently, and Abe swings back out and up to Arcadia House, as if chased.

That feel better, Bit? Hannah says, rubbing Bag Balm into his skin.

Bit’s tongue is frozen. As he struggles and fails to speak, he understands that he hasn’t said much for some time. He tries to count the days but loses track. Words have buried into him, gone to sleep, a frozen ball under the earth of him, coiled and waiting for the thaw.

You’re so quiet these days, baby, Hannah says, pausing as she dreamily combs out her waist-long hair. She gives up when she meets the matted knots. She pulls him to her. It feels too sharp inside Bit to look at her, and so he turns and sits on her bony lap and lets her comb his hair. The teeth of the comb are so gentle on his scalp, it feels like crying. He had forgotten this small pleasure. She says, pressing her lips into the top of his head, My strong, silent boy. Let’s sing. She begins, her voice scratchy, but he won’t sing along to the lullaby, and when he doesn’t, she also stops.

He wakes to see Abe watching Hannah as she sleeps. Oh, Bit thinks. He waits, but Abe lies down. And it is Bit who touches his mother, who pats her face, hands, belly, again and again and again.

In the afternoon, he hides behind the toybox in the Pink Piper while all the other kids pull on their winter things to play outside. He is left alone in the quiet bus. The shouts of the others are muffled by the snowy world outside, and the babies are downstairs with Maria, having a snack or a bottle. He hugs his chest and tells himself the story of the girl and her swan brothers, holds it in his mind and looks at it this way, that way, to find out what it means to him.

Once upon a time, he tells himself, there was a princess. She lived with her six brothers out in the deep forest, hidden from her father’s mean new wife. The stepmother found out where they lived and knitted silk shirts out of magic and threw the magical shirts over the boys and turned them into swans. The princess became sad when her brothers flew away and went into the woods to try to find them. She walked and walked, until she found a little cabin. At dark, she heard the sound of wings and six swans fluttered in the windows. They took off their wings and turned into her brothers, but the boys could be human for only a short time before the robbers who lived in the cottage came home with their booty. She asked her brothers how to reverse the spell, and they said she had to go six years without laughing, singing, or speaking and she must make six shirts out of starflowers.

But remember, they said, if you say even one word, the spell will be broken and we’ll be swans forever.

So the girl went away to collect starflowers and sew. She was quiet as a mouse. One day, some men were walking along and they saw the girl up in her tree where she lived. They called for her to come down and she shook her head and she kept throwing down clothes, trying to get them to leave, until she was naked. Then they dragged her to the king of a faraway place who married her, even though she couldn’t say a word. But when the girl gave birth, the king’s mother stole the baby and told the king that his wife had eaten it. This happened three times until the king believed his wife ate their babies and he said to kill her. The day she was supposed to die was the last day of the girl’s six years of quiet, and she’d sewed everything but one sleeve of one shirt. The brothers flew down to her and she threw the starflower shirts over them and they turned back into people, except that the brother who got an unfinished shirt had a swan’s wing instead of one arm. Then the girl could speak, and she explained what had happened and the babies were brought back and the king’s mother got the electric chair. And the girl and her brothers were happy forever after. The end.