No Book but the World: A Novel (9 page)

But I am not Lisa. I am Ava. I am from away, as is glaringly obvious to everyone here. We have always been foreigners, Fred and I, always and everywhere and by design; our parents taught us to conceive of ourselves that way, and it has forever been true, and we loved it some of the time, it served us well, and also it has been our enduring loneliness.

Well. My enduring loneliness.

What do I know anymore of Fred.

T
HE FIRST SERIOUS DISAGREEMENT
I
ever knew Neel and June to have occurred about a month before the Manseaus moved into the Art Barn. It was over June’s teaching me how to read music. Not teaching me how to play the recorder—Neel thought that was well and good—but specifically teaching me how to read notes on a musical staff. He believed children should learn to play by ear, and mostly under their own tutelage: in the case of a recorder, by fiddling around with the thing, blowing into it and figuring out what happened when you covered up certain holes, in various combinations. In fact, students at Batter Hollow had always been given recorders when they turned seven, and it was a custom to let them do what they would with their instruments, whether that meant taking them apart, using them as swords, blaring into them as hard as they could (although this inclination was generally short-lived—not, Neel would hasten to explain, because there were rules against it, but because everyone else in the community expressed such annoyance that the kid doing it would decide, on his own, to stop), or discovering how to generate actual notes. Sometimes the little ones would appeal to older kids for help, and that was a fine thing, too, Neel said, to come upon a bunch of students of various sizes gathered cross-legged on the ground or sitting up in a tree somewhere, legs dangling from a low branch, melodies and harmonies and squawky odd notes all issuing forth.

But they didn’t receive formal instruction in any instrument until third grade; Neel believed that this early period of free experimentation, when the child is unfettered by a system of notation and accompanying specialized vocabulary, was vital. That was how he talked whenever he was speaking at a conference on child development or on a radio chat show, both of which were regular occurrences when I was little, so that already by age seven I was familiar with the sound of such words and even had a notion of what they meant: they meant running barefoot over grass and dirt and sometimes over nettles, running loose-limbed and headlong until your lungs felt spicy and your throat pleasurably sore, and a high singing sound spun around your head like tiny silver bells.

“Well, but Neel, vital to what?” June asked finally on this particular summer day, not raising her voice but not bothering to disguise her exasperation either. She was a serious amateur flutist and Neel played nothing, except, as he joked, the radio.

We were all outside, Neel and June at the weathered wooden table behind our house, sitting over the remains of a bread-and-cold-soup lunch; Freddy and I sprawled several yards away on the worn brick patio. We were playing with a giant saucepan full of water and a collection of rocks. We were mesmerized by the way they turned different colors when submerged. After a time we’d extract them one by one, and lay them on a tea towel in rows or clusters: pearly ones in this corner, jagged ones in that. Sometimes I’d sort them by sex, girl rocks here and boy rocks there, and sometimes by kind and wicked, and sometimes by happy and sad.

Freddy was good at sorting things, too, although at this moment he was more involved in producing rhythm; he held a rock in each hand and tapped them together, slowly at first and then woodpecker-fast.

“Vital to their being free,” declared Neel.

I was only half listening, enjoying the rough warmth of the bricks under my bare legs and the cadences of their grown-up speech, which, because I bore no responsibility for understanding it, had the effect of heightening the pleasurable apartness of the little world in which Freddy and I were ensconced: the water bent and bowed in the pot; sunlight curtseyed lopsidedly across it and flecks of mica seemed to waver and rise up, float loose to the surface and break open to become part of the sun.

Freddy plunged one of his rocks into the pot and raised it, dripping, to his mouth. I could hear it scrape against his teeth as he put it in.

“They
are
free,” said June. “They have so much freedom.”

Neel gave a laugh. “I’m of the opinion freedom isn’t something we measure, or mete out in coffee spoons, like Prufrock.”

Prufrock was a lovely name. I gave it immediately to the rock in my hand, a slippery bruise-colored thing. “Prufrock,” I whispered in its mineral ear. Freddy made a gagging sound.

“You know that’s not what I mean.” June’s voice sounded as if she were trying to thread it through a needle. I glanced up to see her shredding a crust of bread in her lap. Usually I thought of Neel and June as belonging to the same age group: both of them simply parent-age, but every now and then I would be struck by how much younger June actually was. This afternoon she seemed restless. She was barelegged, sitting with her knees apart under her wide gypsy skirt. Her arms were long and cool-looking and her heavy hair hung haphazardly over the back of her chair.

“If you happen upon a child playing in the mud,” began Neel, slipping happily into his public voice—it had a bounce to it, a kind of robust, holding-forth cheer—“would you try to improve upon the shining moment? Would you launch into a lesson on pedogenesis? Would you discourse on soil composition or erosion? What would that contribute to the well-being of the child? What end would you have in view? Simply”—he could not resist answering his own question—“to impart.”

He pronounced the last unfamiliar word with such derision it made me think of something rude and foolish, like fart, and I laughed and glanced up to see if they were laughing, too. Neel was beaming, but June sat scowling at the litter of crumbs in her lap. Then she swept them brusquely from her skirt. “Why do you do that?” she said. “Pretend like I’m one of your . . . your nuns or your rubes?”

“My nuns?” said Neel, mock-astonished.

I was astonished, too; that was before I knew that Neel had, as a boy, attended parochial school.

June stood. “You know I don’t believe in teaching for teaching’s sake. And you purposely use words you know I don’t know. Pedo-whatever. Why do you do that?”

Freddy made another gagging sound.

With sudden suspicion, I stuck my hand under his chin. “Spit.”

“I know why,” continued June. “It’s a way of making it seem like you know more about everything. But you don’t. Not about everything. I know more about music, and I think she’d enjoy it, be good at it, hungry for it. How is it freedom to deprive them of instruction?”

Who was this “she” of whom June spoke? Was it—I had a swift conviction—me? Was I hungry for something? Ought I to be? What a peculiar, marvelous idea. I tried to picture the thing I must be hungry for, the thing June had in mind for me.

Freddy’s eyes grew awfully round. His mouth gaped roundly, too, a wet black pit.

“Spit,” I said again, suddenly frightened.

He made a thrusting, doggy motion with his neck. It was his queer soundlessness that scared me now, that and the strange purpling of his face.

“Spit it!” I ordered, and thumped him hard on the back.

The stone flew into my palm along with a great mess of saliva. I dumped it in the pot, wiped my hand against the weedy bricks. There was a moment of shocked stillness and then Freddy began to wail, his face bunched as a prune and still nearly as dark.

“He’s fine,” I called quickly. I wanted Neel and June to keep discussing me. I wanted their subject to remain my hunger.

Kneeling close to Freddy, I brought my face into the tangled nest of hair that smelled of his own briny sweat and spoke straight into his ear: “Shut. Up.” But the aperture of his mouth only widened, and he yowled so luxuriantly that both parents flocked over to see what was the matter.

Then I hated him. Maybe a minute earlier he had nearly died, but now he was once more the volatile creature who consumed so much of Neel’s and June’s attention. I stared at him as they flanked him. Those plump little legs I wanted to gouge with my fingernails. That floppy hair, against whose blue-black softness I loved to brush my chin while we read books together, I wanted to yank with all my might.

June picked him up and walked with him into the meadow, rubbing his back.

Neel remained, squatting lightly beside me. Only later would I realize how spry he’d been for sixty-six; then I took it for granted. He cocked his head at me, waiting. He was patient that way, generous; he always wanted to hear your version.

“He put a rock in his mouth.” I shrugged. “I made him take it out.”

Why should I tell Neel he’d nearly strangled?

The blessings of liberty are worth many wounds.

•   •   •

S
URPRISINGLY,
the second major disagreement I witnessed between Neel and June also had to do with me and not Freddy. I say surprisingly because compared with Freddy, I was the easy one, the child who caused our parents hardly any trouble. At least that’s how the story went for a long time.

The second disagreement arose over Neel’s staunch resistance to my wish to follow Kitty to public school, and June’s quietly firm opinion that I should be allowed to try it—but it would not occur for over a year.

The first year of the Manseaus’ living at Batter Hollow was in many ways the happiest of my life. I finally had a friend,
the
friend for whom I’d been pining: a girl my age who lived next door, who at once fulfilled proverbial expectation and satisfied flesh-and-blood reality. The central fact of this year was that Kitty’s parents, like mine, chose not to send her to school. Don Manseau was a former pupil of Neel’s, and after he and his wife had made the radical decision to leave New York City and take up residence in the Art Barn, it was not such a great leap for them to allow their youngest child a year of “experiential learning,” alongside Fred and me, as well as the Gann kids. (Noah Salinas-Buchbinder, the other school-age child at Batter Hollow, attended Freyburg Primary; as a result we saw less of him and tended to be more shy of one another.) Don, who turned out to be the tallest of the three circusy men Freddy and I had seen moving furniture that first day, and Meg, the woman in the flowered dress with the milk-caramel voice, had both left jobs at a graphic design agency to move eighty miles north and devote themselves to earlier, less practical loves: metal sculpting and stained glass, respectively.

They had two older children, neither of whom lived at home: a twenty-two-year-old daughter in the Peace Corps in Malawi, and a fifteen-year-old son at Clembrook Academy in Connecticut.

“It’s a prep school,” Kitty informed me, making a face.

“What’s a prep school?”

“Strict.”

“Why’s he go there?”

“It’s the right place for him.” She said it in a rehearsed way that suggested she was parroting what she’d heard Don and Meg say. For what sort of child was a strict school the right place? I thought her brother must be wild and difficult, impossible to control, worse than Fred. Then I wondered whether prep school might be the right place for Fred, too, and if I should tell Neel and June about it.

But when Kitty showed me a framed photograph of her brother, looking grimly aloof in his navy school blazer and tie—this of course was Dennis—I decided he couldn’t be Fredlike at all. It turned out he was the medium-sized of the three circusy men we had seen the day the Manseaus moved in, but I had a hard time putting together the image of this serious boy with that of the loose-limbed, golden-skinned fellow who’d twirled the lamp base like a white baton up into the twilit sky.

Later I would learn that all the men in Meg’s family had for generations attended Clembrook Academy, and that while she had not planned to send her own son there, Dennis wound up suffering a painful transition to middle school—where, as a soft-spoken boy of slender build with a fondness for gymnastics and Tintin, he became the target of such vicious bullying (all verbal, predominantly female) that he lost ten pounds and had trouble sleeping—upon which Meg and Don decided Clembrook Academy was worth a try after all. When eventually I received pieces of this story, first from Kitty and then Meg and finally from Dennis himself, I felt protective of the boy in the navy blazer and grateful for the existence of a place like Clembrook. Back then, however, I was happy to follow Kitty’s lead and call it Clenchbutt Academy, and to write off her brother as a stuffy prig.

If we had gone to regular school that year, we’d have been in the second grade, Kitty and I. This I had on the authority of Kitty herself, who’d attended kindergarten and first grade in public school in Manhattan, and was thus something of an expert on the subject. Second grade, she informed me with insiderly aplomb, was when you learned cursive and fractions and got to hatch butterflies.

“Neel!” I stormed into our house. June had gone out somewhere with Freddy, but I knew Neel would be in his study, a low-ceilinged room off the kitchen, whose mint-green walls sported not only the portrait of Rousseau but also many framed photographs of Batter Hollow back in the old days. Most of Neel’s writings were about the school in its heyday, how it had changed the lives of hundreds of children, how he personally had encouraged the development of modes of inquiry by stepping out of his pupils’ way. He never used their real names. Instead, following the lead of his hero Rousseau, who’d written a whole book about his hypothetical pupil Émile, Neel wrote of Jill and of John, and despite the fact that they didn’t exist, I came to resent and even despise these two. “Why don’t you call them Ava and Fred?” I asked him once.

He laid a hand on my head and looked kindly down at me. “Because you are you and only you.”

Now I think this answer is not half bad, but at the time I considered it a dodge.

Most of his small study was occupied by an enormous camphorwood desk on which sat an almost equally massive IBM Selectric. I could hear its heavy, arrhythmic clunking now as I flung open the door.

Neel looked up with a scowl of which I took no notice (his standard greeting when interrupted in his study, it was mostly an act, a self-parodying performance of a curmudgeon). When he saw me genuinely bristling with indignation, his mouth curved into a grin. Neel loved uninhibited expression in children, regardless of what was being expressed. In fact he always seemed most delighted by uninhibited
negative
expression.