Breakdown Lane, The (19 page)

“When’s the closing on the house?” Cathy asked me some few weeks later. I’d just had my shot of Interferon, but the period of shakes and nausea that followed was lessening with each round. I’d learned to administer my own shots, practicing on an orange, and was feeling a backhanded competence. If I had to do this, at least I was going to
do this
. The shots would lay me down, but I’d be like one of those Bobo dolls we had as children; I’d take the blow and come up standing. I wanted to talk about the progress I’d been making, but Cathy was unusually upbeat and busy, skipping from topic to topic while making iced tea—but not eye contact. Cath was a big eye-contact person; I was feeling too woozy to get suspicious.

“What do you think the kids will find to do with Janey for eight days?” I asked Cathy. “My sister wouldn’t know what to do with a kid for eight hours.”

“Well, she’s probably got tickets to every Broadway show that’s playing, and she’ll probably buy them their whole summer wardrobe, which will be, ah, good….” Cathy said vaguely. It was not an incisive analysis.

“I hope they won’t be too bored,” I said.

“Oh, I think a break will be good for them, and you,” Cathy told me. She was now straightening my closet, rearranging shirts
by color.
“You can spend some real time with Aury. We’ll take them to, ah, the zoo and stuff. You know, Jules, speaking of which, I have to run. You’re sure you’re okay for now? I’ll give you a call later.”

“Sure,” I said, puzzled. Cathy usually tried to hang around on my first, worst days.

Cathy was a lousy liar.

That night, as the inevitable sleep-and-crackers fog drew on, the kids were great. Extraordinarily great. They brought me ginger ale. They stayed in my room while I corpsed on the bed, too weak to hold up a book, covered in my thickness of blankets. Gabe gave Aury a bath and read to her.

“What d’you want to do, Mom?” Caro asked. “Want to watch TV? Want us to go get you a movie?”

“I couldn’t pay attention to a movie,” I said. “Just…whatever. You guys have already done as much as I could expect. You can go see your friends if you want.”

“No, we don’t want to leave you when you feel so crummy,” said Caro, and at that moment, I actually believed her. “Let’s…uh, play a game,” she said.

I almost sat up, so great was my astonishment.

Given permission to leave, and not even a halfhearted attempt at a curfew, Caro was electing…to play a game?

“You know, like a car game,” Caro continued. “Like we used to do on the way to the cottage in Door County.”

“Okaaayyy,” I said softly, wondering what wires were attached to the detonating device. Gabe returned, reporting that Aury was already snoring.

“C’mon, Gabe, you start. It’ll tire you out, Mom, and you’ll be able to sleep,” Caroline said, and she lay down on the big bed next to me.

Looking back, I really think she was sad that night. I really think she understood the enormity of what they’d planned, and wanted her mommy’s protection. She wanted to be a regular kid again, just for that few hours. Maybe I’m wrong. But she nestled against me, rubbing glitter from her eye paste onto my arm.

“Okay. Greatest name of a football player,” Gabe said.

“N’fair,” I said, trying as hard as I could to enunciate. “I don’t follow the game.”

“Living, playing, or all time?” asked Caroline, and Gabe teased her, telling her she couldn’t say “Brett Favre,” because it was the only name of a football player she knew; and right then, it hit me.

“Johnny Unitas,” I said. I’d always thought that name sounded like a comic-book superhero. I couldn’t believe it belonged to an ordinary person.

“I can’t beat that,” Gabe said. “You pick.”

“Presidents who served more than one term,” I murmured, figuring they’d be unable to think of one.

“Jefferson, Clinton, Johnson, Reagan,” began Caroline. We were stunned silent.

I finally recovered. “What about Roosevelt?”

“I thought you meant two, not four,” said my sister.

“Three,” I said.

“No, four,” Caro said placidly. “He died during the fourth term.”

“You pick,” I told her.

“Greatest name of a Triple Crown winner,” said Caro. “That’s a horse that won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness—”

“I know what a Triple Crown winner is,” Gabe said irritably. Through the slits of my eyes, I could measure him wondering how he could sidle back to the kitchen table, where my computer was, and do a quick search.

“Secretariat,” Caro said quickly.

“He was the fastest,” I said. “I know that. Still is, I think. But I wouldn’t say that was a great name.”

Gabe said, “War Admiral.”

Caro said, “Man O’ War.”

I said, “Okay. You pick.”

“Greatest name of a play.”

“Now or all time?” I asked.

“All time,” she answered.

I thought so long I believed I’d fallen asleep and dreamed the names that paraded through my head:
Suddenly, Last Summer
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
A Raisin in the Sun
, but apparently what I actually said was,
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

Gabe said,
To Have and Have Not
.

I said, “ ’S a movie.”

Caro trumped us all with
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

“Best song that won an Oscar,” said Caro, and voted for “Under the Sea.” That was still her constellation:
The Little Mermaid
! She still thought
Sleeping Beauty
was a big romance. Panicked, I thought,
I can’t do this. She’s still too young. I can’t put this poison in my body and leave her alone for days at a time. I’d almost come to believe in her ever-so-grown-up act. But
it was an act. Leo, I thought. Leo, your dearest little girl needs her dad
. But we were playing a game. All I could think of was my mother, taking every chance she got to say that, when she was a girl, “The Man That Got Away” should have won instead of “Three Coins in the Fountain.”

Gabe said, “Maria.”

I lifted one hand and made my index finger nod in assent.

I saw them look at me. At last, they must have thought, Mom was blessedly asleep. I wondered what they would do. Caro covered my shoulder and kissed my cheek. A tear slid from under my lid, but she didn’t see it, absorbed in pulling the tasseled cord on the bed lamp. My aching back and neck nagged for a painkiller, but I listened as they left the room. Gabe asked, “How come you knew all that shit?”

“Because I know all that shit, Gabe, that’s how,” Caro said.

“I didn’t figure you for the two-term-presidents type,” Gabe said.

“No, you think I’m a valley girl with shit for brains,” Caro said, unperturbed. “But I’m not. That makes me all the more dangerous.”

I hadn’t told them to remember their acne cream or their thank-you cards for their birthday gifts. Not even kissed them good night—and I wouldn’t have ever thought I was kissing them good-bye, really good-bye. I hadn’t even asked them what they planned to do with Janey. Or reminded them to pack something other than jeans. But anything they did had to be better than this, no matter how gray and billowy the ocean at the summerhouse, no matter how greasy the air in Manhattan. They
did
need a break. I felt I saw a wave just then, rise up then, a great, gray glacier, and I dove into it and slept. When I woke, they were gone, and I didn’t see them again until Leo walked them in through that same door.

I slept practically the whole first two days on the bus. When I woke up, we were entering the town of Pitt, Vermont. I’d stumbled onto the bus carrying a plastic bag in case I hurled, still sick as a dog.

Caro had fobbed Cathy off when she picked us up at six
A
.
M
., telling her I was “always like this in the morning.” But after sitting in the next seat for thirty hours, feeling as though she was sitting next to a toaster, even Caroline started to think we should stop in some big town, like Manchester, so I could go to a hospital.

But when I woke up from feeling sick, I woke up completely well. Purged, like. I was desperate for food, and immediately ate everything in both our backpacks. The driver stopped, I washed as well as I was able in the lobby of some Holiday Inn with paper towels and liquid soap. Then, I bought six bottles of orange juice and three plain bagels in plastic wrap from a machine, ignoring the internal voice of my grandma Steiner about the slimy way the bagels looked (“Oy, gevalt!”). I found out that I’d been asleep for so long I’d forced my sister to finish reading
Andersonville
(“And,” she said scornfully, “I
hate
literature!”). She grabbed two of the bagels and one of the juices. “We’re practically there! You ate everything but our socks!” she said. “Have you figured out what you’re going to tell them? The people there? About us?”

“I figure,” I told her calmly, “that if our father is there, he’s going to walk up to us and take us back to his little hut and we’ll figure it out from there, so there won’t be any problem.”

“Have you figured out how we’re going to get to the Crystal Grove or Cave or whatever from”—she consulted the gazetteer, the other thing besides her cell phone that Cathy had forced us to bring along—“there? From Marshfield?”

“Yes,” I said, “we are going to hitchhike.”

“That’s suicide,” said Caro. “We’re going to end up raped in a ditch.”

“Only in California,” I told her. “You can’t kill your hitchhiker in Vermont. It’s a state law.” I thought of the gun, wrapped in my sweatshirts. I could at least brandish it. No one was going to be tying us up and leaving us in a ditch.

No one was apparently going to be picking us up, either, we soon learned.

We sat for the next couple of hours in silence, watching minivans go past, the drivers doing the thing you do when you notice somebody who’s, like, handicapped, but you’re determined for them to think you didn’t see them. I grew considerably more conscious of how I’d sweated and dried in the throes of my virus or what have you. I longed for a hot shower and clean clothes, and pulled the parachute silk of my jacket hood more tightly around my face. I must have looked retarded or dangerous or both. I tried to read a Michael Crichton book, one of a couple of paperbacks I’d grabbed out of my mother’s donation box before we left, but I couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t really know what Dad would think of us being there, or what we’d say to him. Not that you should have to think over what you’ll say to your own father, but these were bizarre circumstances for a surprise visit. I kept trying to plan my sentences for maximum impact, the way I’d heard him do when he did one of his arguments. How
do
you beg your own father to come home and take care of you? It’s his job.
He
should have been the one trying to hitch a ride to get to us. The whole thing made me want to vomit, this time from nerves instead of flu. I didn’t know how I’d feel about talking to Leo again, after so long, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. I could see my mother lying there, her lips barely moving, as she said,
To Kill…a…Mockingbird
. I hoped to Christ the goddamned shots of cancer medicine worked for what she went through after taking them.

After a while, we walked a little way.

There was a store in Marshfield that looked like stores in old TV shows. It had a shelf of cereal, like, two kinds, Raisin Bran and not Raisin Bran. Oatmeal in a barrel. Six boxes of detergent.

Caroline asked for pita bread. I wanted to clock her.

I asked, “Pardon me. Can you tell us how to get to Crystal Grove?”

The old man who ran the place asked, “Whose grove?”

“It’s a…I don’t know, a place where everybody lives in the same place and they have little playhouses they live in.”

“Oh, you mean the hippie joint. Nice folks, generally. Ayuh. Except they’re taking in ex-cons now. Try to teach them better ways. I don’t know that everyone doesn’t deserve a second chance, but seems funny, with all them children there, to take that kind of a risk. Those are men who grew up in New York, Chicago. Not from here. Seems impossible they could adjust…” Caro began tapping her foot.

“But, we have to go there….” she said. “Pretty much right away.”

“Well, it’s about seven miles to the crossroads, County C. Then you go left at the fork, another seven, eight mile. They have a sign about as big as my two hands, but you’ll notice the apple trees, not just Granny Smith or Golden Delicious, but Garland, too….”

“Can we hail a cab?” Caro asked.

“A cab?”

“Can we find a…ride? We, I don’t think we can walk there. My brother is sick, and we just rode the bus from Wisconsin.”

“No cabs around here.”

“Oh,” Caro said. There was a five-minute silence.

“Ned Godin. He’ll be in shortly. He lives out there, does carpentry. Built the porch here for me. Nice porch. Good workman.”

“And, so?” I asked. I wanted to say, Your point is?

“He might give you a ride back, once he gets his nails and such,” said the old man. “One thing they can’t grow’s nails. Nobody can.”
Ayuh, I thought
. They were slower here than in Sheboygan.

“And he’ll be in…?” I asked.

“Lemme see. It’s ten now. Twelve, latest. He called. They have the one phone there. That’s the sum of it. Don’t see why they want to do it that way. Seems a person can do with a little privacy during a conversation…”

“Daniel!” came a voice from the back of the store, where, we saw, there was a little curtain, “Don’t you go chewing off those children’s ears.” A tall old woman appeared; she had the best posture I’ve ever seen other than my mother’s. “You can wait right here. There are two chairs by the window; that’s right, where the checkerboard is….”

We felt we had to buy something, just to sit there that long, and so we bought a bunch of doughnuts, and I don’t think I’ve ever played more consecutive games of checkers in my life. Finally, the doorbell tinkled, and a big, heavy man with a beard strode in—he literally strode, like Paul Bunyan—with a big square wooden box on each shoulder.

“Snow again, you think, Daniel?” he asked.

“Could be. Sugar snow. Won’t stick.”

“I need fifteen pounds of sixteen-penny sinkers, Daniel.”

The old man said that thing again, that sounded phony, like he was in a movie about a guy who owned a general store. “Ayuh.”

“And a thirty-pound bag of wheat flour, two peck of potatoes,” the man went on. The whole thing was like a movie about how you’d act in a small town—in a previous century. The guy was going to need a hand truck. I felt like I was going to crawl out of my own skin, waiting for them to talk about syrup and leaves and shit. The big guy had brought about seventy pounds of stuff out to the car and old Daniel was scribbling on a pad of paper and no one had mentioned us. Caroline kept kicking me in the shin.

Finally, I stood up and said, “Let me help you carry that stuff out.”

“Eh, Ned. These here two young people need a ride out to your spread. Do you think you have room for them?”

“What business have you got at Crystal Grove?” the big man asked me, as if I were the CIA or something.

“We think our father is there, or at least we know he was there,” Caroline said. “His name is Leo Steiner.”

“I don’t know any Leo Steiner.”

“Well, he wrote lots of letters to India Holloway. We know that. They were friends.”

“You say. Did you try to get a hold of him, by writing letters or trying to call him?”

“Of course we did; that’s why we are here. He hasn’t answered.”

“Okay,” said Ned Godin, “get in the truck. You look like you could use a sleep and a good meal anyhow.”

People ordinarily converse in a car, but Ned Godin didn’t say a single word for the entire twenty minutes it took to get from the town to the sign (really, about as big as your hand) over a huge wooden mailbox that read
CRYSTAL GROVE
. There was also a
NO HUNTING
and
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING
sign, which I guess is more severe than merely
NO TRESPASSING
.

“I expect,” he finally said, “I’ll let you wait in the car while I find India. Then she can talk with you.”

We sat there and watched the windshield fill up with snow, for about ten hours.

At last, the passenger door opened, and there was this bright-eyed little old woman all in purple, even wearing high, purple, suedelike Sherpa boots, who said, “Hurry on into the big house. You look a sight.”

Long story short, she wouldn’t listen to anything we wanted to say until we got showered and changed and fed. They gave us coats and boots and sweaters and jeans from this other lady with gray hair but a young, rosy face, whose hair was twisted into a bunch of ropes and twists and clipped down. She asked us for our wash, and I said, “You don’t have to bother, ma’am.”

But she said, “I’m washing anyway. Doesn’t matter how many socks I do.” She said to call her Janet. It was also this same woman, Janet, who gave us big plates of soup with lentils in it—the kind of thing that Caroline would have moaned at if my mother served it, but was glad enough to have it after two days of nothing but two bagels. We ate all that and some homemade applesauce, and then Janet said, “You can meet India in her study. It’s at the top of the stairs.”

The
stairs
were the size of the whole front of our house and they led up to this balcony or gallery about ten feet across, all with big timbers of wood, whole trees it looked like, holding up a peaked roof where some birds were flying around. Off the gallery, there were some real little kids in a schoolroom, and a bunch of closed doors, and finally this massive couple of double doors standing open, with an iron owl holding each door, and we could see India at her desk, which also was big, bigger than our porch. I’d seen strange offices at the university, but India’s office was undoubtedly the strangest office I’ve ever seen anywhere. For starters, where regular people would have a vase or a statue, she had bird nests. Like thirty of them. She had a stuffed snow owl so big it scared the hell out of me even though I knew it was dead. She quickly told us she had not killed it; it had died of natural causes and one of her sons, Pryor, had found it in the woods when he was a boy. There were rocks holding down stacks of paper, and little jars of colored water on the windowsill, a regular birch tree in a pot and, most peculiar of all, a human skeleton I had the feeling was not a model hanging on a stand, with India’s woven purple hat on its spotty head.

“My husband,” she said, gesturing with her pen at the skeleton, “Doctor Hamilton Holloway. This was his wish, you see, that he remain here, and I thought, why scatter ashes, when what better way to teach people, the children and the adults, the names of the bones than with a genuine human skeleton?” I didn’t ask and hoped to Christ she wouldn’t explain how Hamilton Holloway had been transformed from a dead body to a skeleton. “He died six years ago, at the age of eighty-five, and I think his bone structure speaks well of an active lifestyle, don’t you?” We nodded. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think anyone’s skeleton looks particularly terrific. Caroline poked me in the back. “Moreover, it comforts me to have him here.”

Mr. Holloway wasn’t the only skeleton in the room. There were a few other heads, a deer, I guess, and something little, a squirrel, and the whole room smelled like the inside of a nutshell.

“But you’re here about your father,” India said, motioning us to sit down on some fairly normal chairs. She was herself sitting on a big blue exercise ball while she worked at her computer. “Your father was here, for a month, several months ago. He loved the place, and he was a genuinely nice man. But we had to ask him to leave.”

“You did?” Caro squeaked.

“Yes, but not because of anything he did wrong. Although we have our own system for wrongdoing here, and it’s not unheard of, the reason Leo had to leave was because our Gathering didn’t believe his reasons for being here were consistent with our philosophy. You see, my husband started this intentional community with simply ourselves, our daughter and sons, and one other family, the Godins. They’re still here, but so are about twenty other family groups, a few single people, and a few guests of my son Pryor. I’m sure if you spent any time with Daniel Bart at the store, he told you about the dangerous convicts. Well, they’re not. They’re young people who made a couple of serious mistakes in their lives, with drugs or thievery”—I had never heard anyone actually speak the word
thievery,
but she went on “—and it’s Pryor’s contention that working and living here can undo what their previous lives and their incarceration has done to them. I don’t say it isn’t a challenge.”

“About our dad,” Caroline said.

“Yes, of course,” India apologized. “I’m continuing my husband’s work, a study of the evolution of this kind of closed community, the ideals, the adjustment of new members, the inevitable conflicts of trying to live outside the so-called normal world, the personal stresses and rewards; and Leo was very interested, and I must say helpful, in helping me see how it was possible to set up a judicial—”

“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” said Caroline, “but this is so urgent. Our mother is so sick, and we have to find our father. Why did he have to leave?”

“Well, that was just it,” India said, as the lady named Janet entered quietly with a pot of tea and some cookies for all of us. “We don’t accept members who are running from something, only people who are trying to find a way
toward
something. Leo was leaving behind a family, and it wasn’t difficult to gather from our conversations that this was not an amicable or mutual parting. It’s not that we don’t accept divorced people. But we didn’t think that Leo’s reasons for leaving his family were valid, that he’d explored all the ways of healing before making a permanent break.”