Arcadia

by Lauren Groff

  The dawn of the day that Handy is to return from the concerts, the clouds break their bellies overhead and a surprise snow sweeps down in layers upon them. The forest hushes under the unexpected weight, the green buds startled inward, the birds huddled together in suffering. Late in the night Abe had fallen into bed in his work clothes, supervising the last of the woodwork, the last of the painting, the last varnish and sconces and what curtains they have, thrift-store finds, bedsheets sewn into curtains, curtains made from old Indian bedspreads still smelling of sandalwood. Loosely braided rag rugs, even stenciled oilcloths pretending to be rugs, are scattered everywhere. The house is ragtag, Bit overheard Midge complain; but it is complete, paint and plaster, woodwork and glass. Bit, who has never lived in a house, thinks it’s breathtaking, the most amazing thing he’s seen: the space alone threatens to drown him. Abe’s sweat on the pallet last night, though, stank of anxious incompletion. He tossed, fretted: he sleep-talked of broken window weights, unmatched molding, unpainted doors.

  Against the sharp bones of his mother’s ribcage, Bit slept. When Hannah dreamed, the dream was so vivid it entered him; he saw a giant in a charcoal suit, as big as Arcadia House, half the size of the sky. He felt his hand, Hannah’s hand, extend to touch the swollen damp flesh. A nail nicked the giant’s skin, and air began to hiss out like a punctured tire. The man slowly deflated, flabby, shrinking. He was the size of the oak in the courtyard, then the Pink Piper, then the Showerhouse, then the Bread Truck. He was the size of Abe, then Hannah. The face was blank, like those of the Amish dolls Astrid once brought back in repayment for midwifing a baby. The suit the man wore became a pond. He shrank to the size of Bit, then smaller. He became a baby, then a nubbin of a baby, a fleshy balloon in a small red pool.

  At last, the balloon popped. The man was gone.

  Bit opened his eyes to find Hannah looking at him.

  My dad’s dead, she whispered.

  Bit put his hand to the pulse of his mother’s throat, and she fell back into sleep.

  The sun is shy on the white fields now. Before the coffee is finished, the spring warmth melts the snow on the new Arcadia House roof until it is fragile as lace.

  From the window, Bit watches Titus Thrasher come over the Quad with a sad face. A telegram flutters in his hand.

  Hannah is red and puffy. But the invisible straps that kept her arms at her sides have dissolved, and her hands now seem to float. Even her breath seems less labored. Her eyes are enormous in her face.

  I’m okay, she insists to Abe when he clutches her to him. I’m really okay. He kisses her on the temple, but his face is pale, disbelieving.

  They stand again at the Gatehouse, eager for Handy, under sun so hot the snow has vanished. A dozen Newbies wait on the porch, a shoal of Germans unpacked from a hearse painted with passionflowers; two pregnant girls hugging themselves; a matted-haired Trippie muttering angrily to his shoelaces. The Newbie tent is full. Handy will know what to do with all these people.

  It seems to circle, this wash of relief, above and through the crowd: Handy is returning, Handy will know what to do.

  The day is splendid, and as they wait, the men toss a Frisbee on the long road. The women stand in loose clumps, touching one another on the shoulder, on the waist. Eden’s baby is the newest and is passed around. They gaze into her walnut face, each in turn sent on the cosmic energy trip of meeting a new soul. Kitty is so keyed up she takes off her teeshirt, and a man somewhere says in a thick voice, Far out, and Kitty shakes her stuff with a little grin, and it strikes Bit with a sudden force that she is beautiful. With her brown bob and pointed chin, she is a chestnut come alive.

  It seems like forever ago that Handy and the Free People Band left, three months. Bit was a very tiny boy then. He can see himself that day, half a head shorter, his brain a blank, nothing at all to fill it but snippets of images. He sees his mother alone in the winter mud, her stare down the road.

  Now the sound of a motor, and someone’s trumpet blares, and in the far distance around the bend, there it is, the Blue Bus, with Lila in a crocheted bikini and handkerchief posing like a pinup girl on the hood. On the driver’s side, Handy leans out the window, pulsing the horn, a shout braying out of his Confucius beard. Other heads hang out all the windows now. The engine dies and the bus coasts in and people pour off in a fug of smoke, and everyone embraces and Handy shouts. The Circenses Singers are in a goldfinch-colored bus that rumbles to a stop behind the Blue Bus. They pour out. They take out their now-dirtied Adam and Eve puppets, and then two new puppets they’ve made, an ancient man with muttonchops and a gaunt woman with a psychedelic dress. Four new puppeteers have joined; they sing and ring bells, and their song now is even stranger, trembling and breaking in air, making even the spring-fevered birds hush to listen. They finish their tune, and a roar goes up.

  Bit sees new people who clamber out of other vehicles, stretch their limbs, grin; two dozen Newbies that Handy picked up on the road. One of the Newbies says, . . . were going to go to the World’s Fair, but, man, this place is way better . . . One begins to clap her hands and breaks into song, and the old, familiar Arcadians catch on and they all sing now: ’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home; and at the end everyone hoots and hollers, and Handy leaps up onto the nose of the Blue Bus with little froggy Helle on his shoulders; she clutches her father’s head and kisses and kisses his thinning crown. With a hat made of little girl, with glasses filled with sunlight, Handy starts one of his raps. My good people, my friends, my Free People, he says. How blessed we are by the Great Goodness in the world to find ourselves together again, at last . . . Bit is in Hannah’s arms, his hand on her hand, and though everyone else watches Handy, Bit watches the old flowers begin to bloom again in his mother’s cheeks, and he can hardly bear it, it is so good.

  When Handy finishes, Abe lifts Bit from Hannah’s arms and puts him on his shoulders, and steps up onto the Blue Bus bumper and shouts: Those of us who stayed behind have made you quite a present. Brace yourselves, all ye who went on tour!

  Now Peanut and Tarzan roll out the wheelbarrow they decorated in garlands of spring flowers and apple boughs, and they hustle Handy into it and set off at a dead run, and everyone runs beside and behind, and they take turns jostling Handy over the ground to the circular gravel drive at the base of Arcadia House Hill.

  Such billows of laughter! Such long-legged joy! Bit clutches at Abe’s hair as his father gallops beneath him.

  Then someone puts a blue bandanna over Handy’s eyes, and they chair-carry him up the steps while he chortles. Abe throws open the great door and whips off the bandanna and scoops up Bit so that Bit can feel the heat and pulse of his father’s body, and Abe turns to everyone massed on the Terraces.

  We’ve done it, he shouts. We worked ourselves until we were worn out. But we finished Arcadia House, and there’s room enough for a hundred fifty, maybe more, what with the kids’ dorms and the itty-bitty bedrooms, and we even got ourselves a Library and Eatery and toilets and even a generator for a few hours of light and music in the evenings.

  The cheer is the loudest thing that Bit has ever known. A stunned expression grows over Handy’s face. His eyes blink fast. This is . . . neat, Handy says, slowly and quietly, to Abe alone.

  Under Bit, Abe seems to deflate, his shoulders loosening, his head lowering. The people mass behind them and push them into the Entryway, under the great chandelier. Everyone goes quiet because the room is grand and full of sun, and all the Old Arcadians, the original true believers, remember the holes and the spoor and the darkness, the house splintering around them. This, the contrast, the vastness of the space here that they will never be able to fill, eighty tiny bedrooms, a children’s dormitory; all of this magnificence steals their breath from their lungs.

  They scatter. Some find their names on cards on the doors, in Harriet’s calligraphic hand. Others run from room to room to find a place to trade. This new couple wants to be
together, these Newbies would like a nicer room, this married couple separated on the road and needs space apart.

  Someone shouts from upstairs, They’ve enameled the toilets in gold! In the hilarity that rises and echoes in the house, something in Handy’s face relaxes.

  That’s funny, he murmurs. I get it. Diamonds and carbuncles, silver baubles for the kidlets. I read that book, too. Which was it?

  More’s Utopia, Abe says, a little sullen.

  Yeah, Handy says, and he considers Abe. Then, miracles, Handy breaks into that famous smile of his, that dimpled Buddha beam; it turns plain old Handy into something charming. He puts his hand on Abe’s shoulder, and they lean toward one another for a moment. Handy says, Well, all right, then. All right. It’s a good thing. You’ve done good to keep us together, this is a good thing. A great gift. I thank you, Abraham Stone, with my full heart.

  Under the older man’s words, Abe flushes with pleasure and ducks his head like a child.

  That afternoon, before the kegs of Oly beer and jugs of red wine, before the Slap-Apple and pies, before Handy and the Free People start to play their music out on the grass during the wild reunion party that will stretch, thanks to the generator, deep through the night and into the quiet parts of the morning, before the kids heap together to sleep like baby chicks in a nest, before all this uproar, they bring up from Ersatz Arcadia everything that they need for the night, the mattresses and sheets and toothbrushes and soap. Everything else will be carried up the next day.

  Then someone sets off a Roman candle, and in the after-stink of sulfur, the party begins.

  Deep past midnight, Handy stands on a table. How small Handy is, but how he seems to fill all of Arcadia. People are sleeping in the grass. Bit is on a blanket with the other children, their faces smeared with jam and juice, the night turning cold on their limbs. Handy begins to sing, his voice whetted to a knife edge by the Tour. It cuts Bit to wakening when he hears Ole, oleanna, ole, oleanna ole, ole, ole, ole, ole, oleanna. The Norwegian lyrics stretch toward something fleeting, the perfection Handy talks about all the time, dreams about, weaves his seductive words around until it rises, whole and beautiful, before the rest of them. He sings as if today, the day of homecoming, he can reach out to touch what he sees, as if mixed in the victory there is still nostalgia, but for the good present that will soon be the past. Bit looks beyond Handy, to a blanket on the ground where Hannah and Abe are clenched so tight together that it is hard to tell his skin from hers. Yet Bit sees it clearly when he looks at them: even in the darkness, the empty space that keeps the one from the other, the thing the size of a fist, a heart, a loaf, a rose; the size of his sister he’ll never see. Something rips in Bit, and he begins to cry. He cries his overfull heart out, pours it into the dazzled sky. He does so silently. Not yet, noise. It’s still not time.

  It is the day after Handy returned, the day before May planting, and the sun is hot and good. The grass is bristling with green. The women move the last of the stuff up from Ersatz Arcadia, and the children nap in the Dormitory. It feels too strange to sleep without his parents’ smell in the sheets, and Bit watches in the window where a lazy fly buzzes on the glass.

  Like ants that bear bits of leaf and bread, the women go up the hill with their armfuls of goods. Bit’s breath stops: under the green and welcome arms of the oak, he sees Hannah.

  His mother pauses in the courtyard and puts down her pillows. She unfurls her fists. She lifts her arms up and closes her eyes and cants her chin toward the sky.

  Hannah, hands full of sun.

  A soft dawn, under the copper beech that Felipe loved. Maria sings, her voice broken: Gracias a la vida. Ricky’s hands are clumsy on the guitar. Under the leaves, the skin of Maria’s burnt arms shines, slightly wrinkled, like the bark of the tree above her. Her face looks like Hannah’s does when she is in her thickest sleep. The song ends, and someone gulps, and here are the long soft waves of people crying. A minute of silence to remember.

  All that Bit can bring back, though, is one moment of Felipe, a coo of delight, the baby’s face wide with glee, three awkward steps. Then a tumble, and the baby beams up at him from the ground. Even this will fade. Soon, Bit knows, Felipe will no longer be inside Bit but will become a story they all remember together, and better, this way.

  Bit thinks: We are a hive. Get up when we hear other people waking up. Do yoga in the Proscenium together. Warrior pose, corpse pose. Good food smells from the Eatery, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Cookies all day long. No more cold loo on my thighs, warm toilet. No more spiders and wind in the Bread Truck. Now radiators that hunch under the window and clink and hiss on cold nights like wheezing monsters. Now when parents come home in the evening from their work units, they have time to talk. Hannah in a book club, White Niggers of America, her voice flaming bright in the Library; Abe in a political theory group, ten beards leaning into the circle, the soft cheeks of the ladies in the shadows. They build societies of air, then carefully tear them down. The adults have grown softer. They squeeze each other’s arms when they pass, give happy hugs. In the Dormitory, the children lie next to one another for naptime. The warm pile of children, the smell of crayons and clay and paste. Handy’s voice booming and joyous everywhere.

  Bit thinks: Oh, we love each other better now.

  He sleeps one week in the Dormitory, on the squeaking cots, far from the bodies of the others. Leif snores. Jincy sleepwalks. The Dormitory is so vast the shadows thicken and move in the corners. He wakes three times per night, desolate for his mother. At last, he writes a note to Sweetie. He labors over it with a red pencil.

  Im to little, it says. I have to sleep with Abe and Hannah.

  When he hands it to Sweetie, she goes speechless. You can read? she says.

  Sweetie gives the note to Hannah, whose lips form an O.

  Oh, Bit, you can write? she says. She kneels to his height and kisses him.

  He moves into their tiny room on the second floor of the Main House, and sleeps on the old pallet on the ground beside their small iron bed.

  As he sleeps, a fast wind descends on the world and rain slants horizontal. He wakes to the forest thrashing outside in a strange green glow.

  There is lightning, a blue snap, and the world goes jagged. In the flash he sees Hannah midmotion, hair spun over her mouth, sheet peeled to her waist. One breast is in the open. A hairy arm buckles her shoulders.

  In the swallow of black after the flash, he understands what was in the shadow above her crown: Abe’s face, eyes closed, mouth a deeper darkness in the dark of his beard, straining toward something, it seems, he can just about grasp.

  Bit crouches under the cherry tree on the lawn. Wet petals fall on his head and the sun is gentle. The adults are in the fields, planting, save Abe, who must fix the place on the roof where the oak branch fell during the storm. Bit can see the pale blue sweater of his father as he works, reflected upside down in a puddle. From here, his father’s head points into the center of the earth.

  When Bit closes his eyes, he can see what Abe can see, how Arcadia spreads below him: the garden where the other children push corn and bean seeds into the rows, the Pond. The fresh-plowed corduroy fields, workers like burdocks stuck to them. Amos the Amish’s red barn, tiny in the distance. The roll of the forest tucked up under the hills. And whatever is beyond: cities of glass, of steel.

  There would be a strong wind up where his father is. It would be hot, because it’s closer to the sun.

  Bit sees the pink petals skim the surface of the water, passing like ghosts through his father’s body. It is wonderful, absurd. He laughs with sudden lightness, and the sound emerges whole from his mouth before he can clamp it in, a needling sound like an old hinge. He presses his hands to his mouth, and his skin tastes like grass, like dirt.

  For a moment after Bit’s sound, there is nothing. The wind ruffles the water. A bird passes overhead, a brief cold shadow over the sun.

  But now, reflected in the puddle, Abe. Rolling off the ro
of; a marble, a pebble. For one bright moment, Bit’s father hangs in the air. He is stuck, hovering; some string must be holding him. But there isn’t a string. Abe flies down the surface of the puddle.

  Bit lifts his eyes from the water and into the world. He blinks. Things are dim, like looking into the night from a lit room. On the courtyard grass Bit sees a tiny blue crumple. Somewhere, an engine roars to life and a crow hisses from a branch above and Bit’s foot breaks the puddle and he begins to run.

  So lovely, the goosefleshed girls in suits gone flabby, the girls with lips rimmed in blue. Queen of all is Helle. She has been away with Astrid since winter began, returning a week ago to dazzle. She sits, bone white, on the boulder by the edge of the Pond. She is dreadlocked, nose-studded, her elbows puckered with cold. She is so pale Bit can hardly look at her.

  The Pond roars with voices; it hurts Bit’s ears. An early day in May, and freezing, but the kidlets and Ados of Arcadia have come here to soak up the chill sun. What had once seemed to Bit an impossible stretch of water has shrunk with two hundred thrashing bodies in it. He swims to the center of the Pond and goes under. The boys whiten the surface; the girls’ feet dangle off the boulders, small, skimming things. He goes deeper, to the bottom, where the young weeds are nubbins under his feet and the cold clutches at him.

  There is peace in this deep. He is free from the layered tensions of Arcadia, the overcrowding, the hunger. But up where the surface meets the sky, a speck becomes an open hand, becomes a star slowly falling toward him. A pulse in his gut when he sees that it is Helle, her eyes open to search for him. Her feet, landing, send shivers of mud to his knees. She reaches toward Bit, touches his side. Bad Helle, she tickles him.