Arcadia

by Lauren Groff

  I don’t see you working, you little shit, Helle says. Try working once in a while and maybe you’ll deserve respect.

  The boy slowly stands up, and Armand drops his junk on the ground, folding his arms, stepping before him.

  But all the fox-boy says is, All right. Okay. Make you a deal. First time I see Handy out busting his ass like the rest of y’all, I’ll be glad to work myself. Until then, I do what he does.

  The boy settles back between the plump legs of the girl on the mattress and touches the bare back of the other girl with a long, slow stroke. Both girls giggle.

  Helle blanches and strides away.

  Bit would like to explain more to Armand, but the other boy is savagely kicking his box of shit into the Runaway Quonset, muttering, I want to live in the mansion, I fucking came here for the mansion. Bit escapes under a volley of catcalls and sneers from the mattress, and catches up to Helle in Ersatz Arcadia.

  She is crying, and Bit says, aching for her, Helle. Oh, don’t. They’re not worth it. That guy was an idiot.

  Helle passes a forearm over her eyes. She gives a shaky laugh, and the new, harder Helle slides over the old one again. In the face of this complicated girl, Bit feels the straightforward pull of the Pot Plot: there, at least, he knows what he has gotten into, and why.

  Yeah, she says. I know. But, she says, a new sour look on her face; what sucks is that he’s also a little right, Bit.

  It is hot for a June midafternoon. The scent of Verda’s rosehip tea fills the air; her anise cookies are sweet in his mouth. Beside him, on the rug faded into ashy roses, Eustace, the white dog, snaps at his own privates and looks a question at Bit. Bit rubs Eustace’s head, and the dog sighs back to sleep. Bit frames his mother and Verda in the viewfinder of his camera, their heads on opposite sides of the table, loose wisps sparking with light from the window. Hannah is intent on Verda, who has gone distant, the recorder spinning at her elbow.

  They were deeply strange people, she says in her anchorite’s rasp. They called themselves Divinists, because they believed that people could become perfect, therefore divine. They believed that intercourse was a gift from God and had great quantities of it with everyone in the community. To avoid the consequences, namely babies and love, they had a rotational schedule: every night, a new woman with a new man, and the men had to release themselves into their handkerchiefs.

  Bit shrivels inside himself a little. Verda looks at him. You will forgive me, Ridley, for my bluntness, she says in her grand and distant way.

  She says, But then their leader, John Noland, my great-grandfather, decided it was time to reproduce. He had gone to a Shaker community and saw that they were in danger of dying out, and didn’t wish that upon his people. And so they instituted a program called Eugeniculture. The most spiritual men and the most spiritual young women were allowed to mate, after a very thorough matching. Of course because the most spiritual men were old men, and nobody was more spiritual than John Noland, out of forty-eight babies born, twenty-three were his. One of them was my grandmother Martha Sutton. Her mother, Minerva, was, at the time, a bare thirteen years old.

  Verda smiles wearily. One finds that when children are involved in these things, she says, the cracks in the system become clear. Babies that belonged to individual mothers, the claim on the fathers. There was some romantic love going on, verboten of course, and the breeding program interfered with the heart. And, of course, the parents had to watch as their twelve- and thirteen-year-old daughters slept with old men. Word spread to the outside, newspapers had fiery editorials, and John Noland was chased out of Summerton by the townspeople. He fled to Canada. There was nothing binding the community. The center could not hold.

  Hannah’s face is shining. Bit clicks another photo of her, and then one of Verda, reflected again and again in the tarnished silver tea set on the table. Verda says, My dear Hannah. I have to stop. I am very tired, and I need to be alone.

  Thank you, Hannah says. Her hands are shaking when she lifts her teacup to her lips. Do you have any primary sources, by any chance? Papers, things like that?

  Verda says, Loads. She stands and pulls down a hatbox, and when she releases the top, there pours out the smell of sage and tobacco. I’ll give you my great-grandmother’s diary, she says. But that is all for this visit, at least. I’d like for you to return for something, even if it’s just a dusty old book.

  She sees Bit gaping into the box and lifts out the dull gleaming thing he is trying to see.

  Scrimshaw, she says, putting it in his hands. Walrus tusk. One of John Noland’s sons went out on the high seas and carved the face of his wife over and over again. After a year away, he came back to port and learned that she’d died of yellow fever the day after he’d left.

  In wonder, Bit traces the woman’s face, echoed in the bone. It is Helle, to the life.

  Please, Verda says now, taking back the scrimshaw and closing up the hatbox. I have a headache bearing down on me. But do return and bring some of your bread. And those leaves to smoke. It helps with my arthritis. Also bring young Master Ridley, who was so bored he took a nap today.

  I wasn’t bored, he says. I’m relaxed in your presence.

  They grin at one another, and she almost touches him, her claw hovering over his shoulder. You give me hope for the next generation, she says. Not that I believe humankind will last another century. She gives a gruff laugh.

  He says, Doom and Gloom Verda.

  She says, Off you go to your delinquency. Off you go, Hannah, to write your book.

  Something peculiar flits across Hannah’s face, a daring, a desire, and then she tamps it down and says, softly, It’s just a lecture.

  Nonsense, Verda says, closing her eyes. And my migraine has arrived. With bassoons and timpanis. Let Eustace out to fend for himself.

  They tiptoe out and close the door. Again in the bright expanse of the day, Bit wants to break into a run. But Hannah mutters out of the side of her mouth, Let’s go tend our plot, and Bit is returned to the world of worry. In Verda’s little cottage, the plants out on the island had simmered at the back of his mind, a shadow thought that only sometimes overwhelmed him.

  They find the plants huge, almost overgrown: all females, the males plucked out early, all almost twelve feet tall. Bit crouches on the bank, skipping stones until Hannah is finished, and they wade back through the stream to the path. Two more weeks, she says. Then pick and dry and we are on our way. She touches his arm, smiles crookedly. Then you can be a kid again.

  He tries to sink himself into identifying the plants at his feet, the jimsonweed someone sowed long ago, the painted trillium, the jack-in-the-pulpit. But when they are halfway home Hannah sees Bit’s face. Oh, kiddo, what’s wrong? she says.

  He says, It’s just. I mean, if someone gets in trouble, it may be us, but it may be Handy. It’s not right.

  Handy schmandy, Hannah says. None of this would be necessary if Handy didn’t make those decisions he made and get us into a bind and then back out of the Council of Nine. He abandoned us. Got us into a mess and left us to fend for ourselves.

  He didn’t abandon us, Bit says. He’s still our spiritual leader.

  Hannah snorts, says, Right. All-Arcadia Yogas? Remember the time he made us all have an Eyesight Yoga? No corrective lenses because they separate you from the spiritual world? Remember what happened?

  Muffin fell in the well, Bit says.

  And the Weeklong Silence Yoga?

  The kidlets freaked out and had bad nightmares, Bit says.

  And the Poverty Yoga? When we weren’t supposed to have medications or extra food for three months and send all that money we saved to Mount St. Helens victims?

  Bit shivers, remembering: Hannah, off the pills she’d been taking religiously, had returned to the dark creature in the bed whom he’d had to slowly draw into the light so many times over the years. I remember, he says. Okay.

  When they come into the sunflower field, Hannah shields her eyes from the glare and l
aughs to see Simon welding away at his sculpture. Bit was near Hannah when Simon sidled up to her in the Eatery the other day; he was close enough to overhear their conversation. Simon had been famous in the Outside, an artist. He was handsome, with hard blue eyes and a tight frowning face. He’d muttered to Hannah that he was building her a sculpture out in the sunflowers. She was his Muse, he said. For a moment, through Simon’s gaze on Hannah, her motherness fell away, and Bit saw her as lush and attractive as she must be to men, with her long golden braids and roundness and the warmth in her large eyes. Oh, she’d cried out happily, that’s so lovely of you, Simon, and Bit felt the beginning of the old anxiety moving through him, that she would break the fragile bond of family and find a new allegiance away from him.

  When Bit says to Hannah, jostling her back onto the path, Are you really going to write a book? he knows he’s really saying, Please don’t change and leave me.

  And when she touches his cheek with her callused hand and says, Maybe yes, maybe no, he knows she’s really saying, You don’t have to worry about me.

  Helle comes up to Bit. Cole and Dyllie and Ike have pushed their dinner plates to the side, and they are playing kick hockey with a bottle cap they found in the Motor Pool.

  Hey, she whispers, Bit, I need you.

  Ike looks up, his face contorted with disgust; he hates his sister, he says, but he watches and mimics her. Cole looks up, too, confused. Dylan does not even see Helle; he has the gift of focus and is kicking the bottle cap across the table with his fingertips.

  Gimme a second, guys, Bit says. He crosses the Eatery with Helle, feeling tall for the first time in his life. They go down the hallway where the Tuesday night bathers are waiting for their three weekly inches of warm bathwater, and into the Library. In the far corner, there is a raging book discussion of The Mismeasure of Man. Abe is there, face full of joyous argument. He sees Bit and lights up further, and waves, blowing a huge kiss. Bit pretends to be embarrassed.

  Helle turns to Bit. I need you, she says again, so low only he can hear it, and she twists the hem of her teeshirt in her hands. She is jittery, darting. You’re the perfect accomplice, nobody ever gets mad at you. Please, please, please, she says.

  There is magic in perfect, in accomplice, and he says, without thinking, All right.

  They go up the grand Entryway stairs, hearing the noises of a house overfull with people: someone plays on a common room piano (stuck D-flat), the recorder group trills its way through a madrigal, voices are raised, shouting or just discussing, babies shriek and are hushed with breasts or murmurs, the kidlets in the Dormitory across the courtyard are singing the good night song: The Dream passes by the window. And Sleep by the Fence . . . He follows Helle into the brightest, biggest common area. Arcadia House is arranged around six central common rooms, each area separating into anywhere from twelve to fifteen bedrooms big enough for two adults or three tightly packed Ados. This common room they are in is the grandest: the two-story windows hold the dying sunset, the people pouring across the lawn, the lights coming on down in Ersatz Arcadia. There’s a catwalk with another floor of bedrooms up a curved staircase that Bit can never look at without a sense of foreboding.

  Helle puts her hand on Bit’s lips and pushes open Handy’s doorknob. Before Bit can protest, they’re in. Handy and Astrid have the largest bedroom in Arcadia House, two smaller rooms knocked into one, from a time so long ago when there was more space than Arcadians to fill it. Ludicrous thought! In the wall, there is a door built leading to Lila and Hiero’s bedroom.

  Why are we here? Bit whispers, something curdling in his throat. When the community grew beyond Arcadia House, four years ago, they established the Council of Nine, an elected board, and although he and Astrid were given permanent seats, Handy protested: let it all grow organically, he said. But the rest were afraid that the needs of people down in Ersatz Arcadia, the Hens and Singletons and Newbies and Nudists, would be ignored for those of the privileged up in the House. In a pique, Handy withdrew, mostly to his room. Although all bedrooms in Arcadia are ostensibly open to everyone, Handy’s alone feels sacrosanct. Bit has never heard of anyone just walking in.

  Helle is on her knees digging through Handy’s cardboard chest of drawers. Bit runs his hand over the instruments mounted on the wall: guitar, ukulele, banjo, sitar, fiddle. He peers into the closet. Astrid’s side is severe, the long sack dresses, the clogs, the folded shawls. Handy’s overflows with Hawaiian shirts and army jackets, corduroys, luxurious heaps of newish socks.

  When Bit turns to Helle, she is draped across the bed. He remembers the Indian spread from the Pink Piper long ago, but in the wedge of late, sickly sunset, the pinks and golds seem alive. Helle’s threadbare teeshirt goes transparent, and he can trace the slopes of her ribcage, the warm nestle of her belly button, the pointy bra that all women of Arcadia wear, a Dumpster full of them found outside a lingerie factory in Binghamton. The bow between the cups seems as delicate as a petal to Bit, as if it would fall off if touched.

  She sees him looking. Come here, she says. He goes and lies in the dying light beside her. You have a girlfriend, Bit? she says. She smells like the vanilla the girls beg off the Bakery and dab at their wrists, napes, behind their ears.

  No, he says. He is careful not to touch any part of her, even the fabric of her shirt. In profile, there are hollows under her cheekbones. She looks like the feral cat that haunts the Octagonal Barn: angular, hungry.

  I had a boyfriend Outside, she says. He was forty. A bartender. Her smile is a private one. She says, He took care of me. She turns her head, and he can feel her breath against his cheek.

  Did he know you’re only fifteen? Bit says.

  She closes her eyes, turns her head away. Didn’t matter, she says.

  He would lie like this forever. It doesn’t matter that they’re not touching. Her weight bends the mattress, her warmth radiates the length of his arm. She palms something and puts it in her mouth and swallows it. When she turns to him, she holds another pill in her hand, something red and white, and puts it gently between his lips.

  Swallow, she whispers.

  He holds the pill there between his lips for a long while, debating. When the first line appears between her eyebrows, he swallows the pill. She closes her eyes. Good Bit, she says, petting his arm.

  He doesn’t know how long he is there with Helle; the window goes black. He watches her as she rests. Then her eyelids spring up when the door opens and the light goes on overhead. He feels a bad sickness stir at the roots of him.

  What the? says the old familiar raspy voice; Handy is home. Oh. Helle, he says.

  Handy puts down his guitar case in the closet and sits on the ladder-backed chair on the side of the room.

  Heya, Little Bit, Handy says, nodding to him. May I ask what you two are doing in my room?

  Helle struggles up, pulling at the hem of her teeshirt, her movements exaggeratedly slow. Handy, she says. Just relaxing.

  You couldn’t find any other place in this big old barracks to relax, huh? he says. Like a common area? Like your own room?

  He’s smiling, but his cheeks look too taut. If only Bit could find his tongue, he would be glad to tell Handy all about it.

  Astrid let me come into your room whenever I wanted to, Helle says.

  Astrid’s not here, Handy says. Did you ever imagine, Helle, that I might have had a visitor tonight?

  We are your visitors, Helle says.

  You know what I mean, Handy says.

  I know what you mean, Helle says, and whatever drug had tarred her voice is gone: it is now the crispest thing in the world. She says, Fiona, right, Handy? I think that’s just sick. She’s like three years older than I am. You knew her when she was four.

  She’s of age, Handy says. Not that it’s any of your business.

  Oh, no, Helle says. It’s none of my business, even though you’re my dad. And Astrid is none of my business either, even though she’s my mom. Why she chose to open up the school all t
he way down in Tennessee way far away from you isn’t my business, clearly. Never, no, not at all. We don’t get involved in each other’s lives in the Friis family.

  My private life is my own, Handy says, his voice gone steely. Just as yours is your own.

  Right, Helle says. Exactly. I can fuck whoever I want and you wouldn’t care.

  Feel free, Handy says. Just do it somewhere else.

  Okay, Helle says. Maybe I will. How about Kaptain Amerika? He’s old and ugly and fried as hell. Our kids would have gills or something. Maybe I’ll go seduce, oh, I don’t know, Hiero. What would you think about that?

  I would think it would be awfully strange if Hiero would succumb to your oh so evident charm, Handy says.

  I get my charm from my dad, Helle says. Hiero will love it. Or, what about, let’s see. Bit right here. Little Bit. Sweet and gentle little Bit, the kid who you always liked more than all the other kids in Arcadia, or so you said over and over again in front of us when we were little. Over and over and over, That Bit Stone is plugged in to the Universe, man, she says in Handy’s voice, then turns, furiously, toward Bit. So, what do you think? Want to do the nasty?

  Helle, come on, Handy says. That’s enough.

  Helle? Bit says so quietly that he may have only said it inside his own mouth.

  What’s enough, Handy? What’s enough? What’s wrong with Bit?

  There’s nothing wrong with Bit, and you know it, Handy says. You just leave Little Bit alone and don’t get him all mixed up with your dramas, okay?

  Yeah, Helle says. Great. I get it. Bit, who is no blood relation to you, sparks your protective fatherly gene. Magnificent.

  She turns to Bit, snarling, and he doesn’t understand what is going on, or why she hates him so much right now. Helle? he says. She’s running headlong from the room. Handy leaps up and bars her way. They struggle in the doorway, and Handy jams his hand down into Helle’s right pocket, and pulls out a plastic bag. You little idiot, he says, releasing her into the common room, where she rubs her upper arm. Already, a bruise is forming on her white skin. Handy says, You thought you could steal from me. She backs out the door of the common room, keeping her eyes on her father’s face, and when she reaches the hallway door, she pulls another bag out of her left pocket.