F
inn follows Alice as she rides her bicycle up the winding hill. She wants to show him something. Her blond braid is swinging across her back as she stands on the pedals, struggling against the incline. He knows he’s supposed to be back at the cottage by noon. At least they are starting to give him a little room to breathe; they must know there’s nowhere he can go. But the freedom has limits. Strict ones. Be back by noon for lunch. Home before dark. In bed (with lights out) by ten.
Alice doesn’t seem to have any rules. Her mother works at the Miss Quimby Diner every day except for Monday, and Alice is mostly on her own. And her mother
trusts
her. Then again, she’s probably a good kid.
“So do you live at the beach?” Alice asks when they get to the top of the hill.
“Yeah.”
“That must be so cool. I’ve never been to California.”
“It’s all right,” he says.
“You must hate it here,” she says.
“Nah,” he says. “I used to come here when I was little. And it’s just for the summer.”
“Follow me,” she says, getting off her bike. He gets off his bike too and leans it against a tree. She takes his hand and pulls him toward what seems to be the entrance to a path in the woods that border the road.
“Where are we going?” he asks, aware of her hand squeezing his.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says, and pulls him along.
They trudge through the forest, which is thick and smells good. Woodsy. Alice pushes aside branches that obstruct their path, holding them for him as he follows close behind.
“It’s not much farther,” she says.
Finn looks at his watch:
11:15
. He wonders if there’s any way he’s going to be able to make it back to the cottage by noon. He promised his father he’d be back for lunch. It was part of the deal.
Finally, they get to a clearing. The sun is so bright it’s almost blinding. There is a huge field, so impossibly green it might not be real. There are wildflowers everywhere:
pink phlox, purple violets, yellow euphorbia, red trillium.
He miraculously recollects the names his father used to recite when his family took long walks together in the mornings after breakfast. Some of the names reminded him of nursery rhymes:
lady’s slippers, Dutchman’s-breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit.
Franny liked to collect the flowers and press them between the pages of the heaviest books in the bookcase. There are flower petals carpeting huge expanses of the field, like snow in the summertime. And around the entire field are weeping willows, bowing.
“Wow,” Finn says.
“Nobody knows about this place, except for me,” Alice says. “And now you.”
Finn sits down on the ground, surveys the scene in front of him.
“I come here when I’m stressed out,” Alice says, sitting down next to him.
He nods.
Alice sighs. “You probably should know my daddy’s up for parole in August. My mom’s a wreck. If you meet her and she’s kind of weird, that’s why.” She plucks a long blade of grass from the ground and slips it between her fingers.
Finn looks at Alice’s skinned knees, at her sneakers, which are dirty and riddled with holes.
“My mom’s a mess too,” he says.
“Really? Isn’t your dad some famous writer or something? It must be awesome to be in a family like that.”
Finn shields his eyes from the sun. “My sister died last fall.” As the words come out, he imagines them like birds. Big ugly crows, flapping their wings, hovering in the air between them. “And since then everything’s gone to shit.”
Alice nods, looks past him at the endless field of Crayola colors:
magenta, cornflower blue.
Then she cups her hands together, presses the blade of grass to her lips, and blows. The sound that comes out is loud and shrill. Like sadness, like moaning.
“That’s a cool trick,” he says, and she shows him how to do it.
At 11:45 he says, “Hey, I gotta get back home.”
“Okay.” She shrugs. “Let’s go.”
H
e writes and then deletes. Writes and deletes. There are words and then nothing but pure, white space. It’s the technological equivalent of a wastebasket overflowing with balled up pieces of paper. He smirks, thinking how many trees he must be saving. The books he has taken out of the library are stacked precariously at the edge of his desk. He has read them like a child, flipping open to random pages, unable to sit and concentrate on any single book long enough for it to make real sense. But he knows the answer is somewhere in these pages, in the pages he has not yet written. In the words that won’t come.
This is what he has learned so far:
A healthy, properly nourished human being can live for sixty days without food.
Fasting can bring euphoria, heighten the senses.
Hindus fast. Moslems fast. Jews, Mormons, all sorts of Christians fast. People of all faiths feel closer to God when they are deprived of food.
People fast to change the world: English suffragettes, Irish nationalists. Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara. The body can become the battleground for political struggle. Mahatma Gandhi. One’s own life the means of negotiation.
Kafka’s
A Hunger Artist
inspired a flux of public fasts in 1920s Europe: starvation performances, the body a circus.
There are litanies of medieval women who fasted for prolonged periods of time, refusing sustenance other than twigs, herbs and the Eucharist. This denial was considered a miracle, and the women were deemed saints.
Despite all this, hunger is rarely voluntary. The number of people dying of malnutrition, of poverty related starvation, in the world at any moment is unknown.
In many cultures hunger is cyclical: a balance between satiety and starvation, the knowledge that before feast there must be famine, a hungry season before the rains and the harvest.
Sam does not know what to do with this information. It swirls in his head like numbers used to when he took calculus his first year of college. It is both connected to the world and completely disengaged. When he closes his eyes, he pictures a man. It is winter in Minnesota, in 1944. He is one of the men who volunteered to undergo a controlled experiment. To be systematically starved and refed so that the US government might understand how to revive all of the people who had been deprived of the most basic of human needs. He is tall, already thin, and he can feel the winter in his bones.
Sam stares at the blank screen, at the blinking cursor. He types a sentence, two, three, conjuring winter, evoking snow. But the words are too thin, as fragile and brittle as bones. He hits the backspace button and puts his head in his hands.
M
ena and Sam walk toward Effie and Devin’s camp on Friday night, and the loons are cackling on the lake. Mena can see them preparing to lift off from the water, their wings spread wide, their beaks set, certain. She feels her own chin rise up, determined. “This will be nice,” she says.
Sam is inspecting the label on the bottle of wine.
“What does he do again?” Sam asks.
“I think he’s an artist. Assemblages. Like Joseph Cornell. Remember the exhibit we saw at MOCA?”
Sam nods.
“What are we having for dinner?” he asks.
“Does it matter?” Mena asks, and then bites her tongue. “Let’s just try to enjoy their company. It’s been so long since we’ve done anything like this.”
When they get to the camp, Effie is outside and Zu-Zu is toddling around on the large front lawn. Effie stands up and comes to them. She is wearing a long sundress, and her hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail. “Hi!” she says. She embraces Mena, kisses her cheek, and Mena is surprised by this easy affection. She envies her grace, the breeziness of her. She smells like cinnamon. “I’m so glad you came! And you must be Sam,” Effie says, reaching out her hand.
“Nice to meet you,” Sam says.
“I’m a big, big fan.”
Sam looks at her, momentarily bewildered.
“I’ve read
The Hour of Lead
about fifty times.
English major,
” she says, by way of explanation.
Effie gestures to the camp. “Devin’s cooking dinner. I’m pretty useless in the kitchen.” She smiles and lifts up Zu-Zu, who is tugging at her skirt. “Have a seat. I’ll open the wine,” she says, and disappears inside with Zu-Zu on her hip.
Later, inside, as the manicotti cooks, Devin shows them his work, the assemblages displayed on shelves, which cover an entire wall.The boxes, most not much bigger than a shoe box, are handmade, wooden, and inside each one is a different miniature world made of things like sand, glass, butterfly wings and colored paper. Mena looks at Devin’s big hands and wonders how they could possibly do such delicate work.
“These are beautiful,” she says, peering into one box; suspended, magically, in thin air is one black curl, tied with a tiny yellow ribbon.The tiny engraved silver plaque on the box says,
ZU-ZU’S FIRST HAIRCUT.
Another one, labeled NOVEMBER 28, has a tiny blue robin’s egg with the smallest crack.
“The day Zu-Zu was born,” Devin says.
She tries to imagine what she would put inside a box like this. What the plaque would say.What objects could make the museum of her family’s life.
They eat outside at a picnic table. Mena keeps accepting the wine they offer her, feeling the warm happiness of forgetting. Of losing herself in the flush and buzz. After Devin clears the plates away, they sit in chairs facing the water and drink more wine.
Sam is playing peekaboo with Zu-Zu. Mena watches his face light up each time she squeals. Zu-Zu comes over to him, pulls his nose and runs away, laughing with one of those full belly laughs that makes Mena weak in the knees. Devin and Effie sit together on the grass; she fits snuggly into his lap, like a Russian nesting doll. Mena watches him kiss the top of her head. It makes her ache.
“We’d really, really love to have you come to one of the book club meetings at the library,” Effie says. “I know it’s pretty small-time compared to what you’re probably used to.”
“Why not?” Sam says. His spirits seem high tonight, Mena thinks. “Just let me know when.”
Effie claps her hands together. “That’s great! Thank you so much. There might even be a small stipend. It would probably be small enough to be insulting actually, but I can at least promise you some lively conversation.”
“Sounds like fun,” Sam says.
“Are you working on anything new?” she asks.
Sam nods.
“I’m sorry. I’m so nosy.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m only beginning, really. It’s just a bunch of images in my head right now. Just ideas.”
They eat as the sun goes down. They drink. Mena drinks and drinks. When it is time to go, she stands up and feels wobbly with the wine. Thick and buzzing.
“Next time, you guys come to our place. Mena is an amazing cook,” Sam says. “Do you like Greek food? Maybe
pastitsio
.”
And then Sam is steering her toward the road, waving good-bye to Zu-Zu. Mena looks at them, this family, at all that promise. They stand together, a portrait that reminds her of everything she’s lost.
She’s had too much to drink. She is trying not to cry until after they are out of sight of the house. She is aware of everything: the pebbles under her feet, the indigo sky streaked with clouds. She is aware of Sam’s palm pressing on her lower back, holding her up. They walk in silence all the way back to the cottage. She will not cry. She will not fall apart. Luckily, Sam doesn’t let go. He must know that if he does, she might simply not be able to stand up on her own.
She remembers this feeling, this falling feeling. She remembers the way her body defied her. The way she crumpled, the way she collapsed. The feeling like those dreams where you are plummeting, but unlike the dream, she kept falling and falling. He’d been there then too. Holding her up.
Inside the cottage, Sam helps her get undressed, lays her down. He sits down on the edge of the bed.
“Sam,” she says, her voice catching in her throat like a burr. She reaches for him and when he takes her hand, she pulls it, gently, pleading without speaking for him to come to her. To lie with her. “Please,” she says. “God, please just come to me.”
Sam looks at her, his face full of pity.
She tastes bile in her throat, the wine sour as it rises. And then all that sadness turns to anger, to rage. She sits up and starts to hit him, softly at first and then harder and harder as his body refuses to yield to her hands. She pounds his chest, his back, his legs.
“Goddamn you! You bastard.You goddamned bastard!” she yells.
He glances at their open door. “Shhh,” he says.
And this makes her angrier.
She hits and hits and hits until she is drenched in sweat, until he grabs her wrists and stops her. After a while, he lets her go and she lets her numb arms fall to her sides. Then she lies back down, curling into herself, weeping. But he doesn’t touch her. Not even a soft hand on her shoulder. But he also doesn’t move from the bed.
They stay like this for a long time. Long enough for her ragged breaths to grow slower, more even. For the hiccuping sobs to subside.
Finally, she says softly, “Remember?”
Mena tries to think of the moment she had wanted to share, but suddenly the memories are all fragmented, each recollection a tiny bit of paper, confetti tossed up into the air, falling all around her. Coating her eyelashes, her shoulders, her hair.
She reaches for him then again, still trying to hold on to something, but he is standing. Leaving. And when he closes the door behind him, she starts to fall again, and this time there’s nothing at all left to hold on to.