“Breakfast, Ivy?” This, the early-gray witchy-haired youngish woman with the high, almost tweety voice and something else that Ivy finally registers, a Chicago-area accent. Lee Lynn.
Ivy says, “Sure!” She smiles around at all the faces of those rather tightly surrounding her. Sentries again?
“We are your tour guide crew,” a slim woman (whose dark hair must be a wig, so solid and swollen and dead-looking it is) tells her, as if correcting her thoughts. But Ivy still feels guarded. She is still not trusted. And for Ivy this has become her true mission, to be trusted, newspaper story or no newspaper story. She can’t bear to be seen by anyone as a trickster. She may be harsh in her columns, well, uh, mean-spirited. But she is not a trickster. It is probably her very honesty that seems harsh.
Everyone notices her change of skin color, their eyes held on her overly long. “I was in a ditch. At night,” she says gravely.
She pulls out a chair at one of the long tables. Gordon’s ex whose name is Claire, the short, bubble-round, fifty-ish-thereabouts, bespectacled Indian woman (dressed today in a sky-sized aqua-colored T-shirt with badly-sewn seams, but fresh-looking), pulls up a chair across from her. She winks at Ivy in a sisterly way. Many women and young girls are converging now. “Hi, Ivy!” they all greet her. Ivy repeats the ditch-at-night business to each new stare. Lee Lynn, the witchy one, promises to fetch her some Settlement-made poison-ivy remedy, a cream made of weeds. The word “herbs” is used. But “weeds” is the word Ivy’s brain sees typed out across her mental screen. And weeds are the enemy, whether in ditches or bottles, by Zeus!
No sign of Gordon St. Onge. In fact, most of the men have been leaving in droves, turning into shop doorways or ambling out across the quad. Plenty of old people here look awfully settled in, propped in chairs or scuffing by on walkers and canes. One of the tour guides looks at least a hundred. Like one of those cute, sunken-mouthed apple dolls but for her occasional tight-lipped severe expressions, yeah, cuteness comes and goes. She wears an olden-days nurse-type pale-blue pinstripe dress. No embroidery.
All around, hither and yon, plenty of kids, babies, and dogs.
Ivy munches on a fat yellow muffin. She is happy. The women are telling her their various personal versions of last night’s rip-roaring thunderstorm.
With merry eyes now, the apple-doll-face woman says, “Man in Kezar Falls has been struck twice by lightnin’.”
Another old gal, round of body, electric-white short straight-and-upright exclaimy hair, eyes narrowed, clucks, “Used to be you only got lightning in June, July, and August. Now it even rumbles in January. Ain’t right.”
A lanky, muss-haired boyish girl or girlish boy Ivy remembers from the morning of the solstice, still shoeless and shirtless, wearing only black lopsided (probably made in a sewing lesson) shorts, appears beside Ivy’s chair, holds out to her a violin stained a weird but enticing color, a color that seems not of this planet. Shimmery red-blue-purplish-deep-deep brown. The child declares, “I made it.”
Ivy wipes her hands on the clean rag given to her as a napkin. She smiles into the child’s face. “You made this violin?”
“Fiddle.”
“What’s your name?” Ivy allows the instrument to be placed in her hands.
“Tamya Soucier.”
Ivy glances around at the faces of the women. “Aurel’s daughter?”
Claire nods. “One of them.”
“You actually made this, Tamya?”
The kid squints at Ivy’s face, incredulous of Ivy’s incredulousness. “My other ones didn’t work out.” She reaches between Ivy’s hands and the young fingers press and prod deftly over the graceful neck of the instrument and she confesses, “I can’t play it too good. I’m not musical. You would cry if I played it.” She withdraws her hands, which are cool, bumping against Ivy’s, and she smiles crookedly and Ivy sees this little girl’s eyes are a brown even more tender and grace-filled than those of Ricardo, the young fellow with the Chinese pants who had been her “waiter” at the solstice affair.
“Ivy!” Now someone hurries up behind her and kisses the top of her head. What a coincidence. Ricardo’s sister, Heather, Ivy’s old sentry. She knows the voice well. She turns in her seat and smiles up into that serious, almost sad face, framed by stiff, short pigtails. Now, turning back to the younger girl, she asks, “What is this stain? It’s really different for a fiddle.”
With much authority, Tamya answers, “Iodine.”
“Iodine?”
“Yep. Just, you know, I-o-dine.”
“You really made this?”
Tamya smiles, then says with saintly patience, “Yes.”
Ivy glances at Claire, who, of course, no longer wears the cardboard crown, but just her graying black hair in a large braided knot on her head. And then that vast aqua homemade T-shirt. Breasts vast. No, not breasts. BaZOOOOMS. Small hands on the table, eyes on Ivy. Those steel-rimmed glasses, resurrected from some old trunk? Yard sale? And her expression seems resurrected from a grim old sepia photograph, back when a person had to hold wearily still for eons before the photographer’s black powder flash poofed.
Outside in the speckledy shade and little globlets of sun, hurrying past this long wide porch now, are two women. They both sport cool-dude sunglasses and swinging ponytails. T-shirts with embroidered creatures flocking around the square necklines, also vines and buds and blossoms of yellows and blues and stems of a live-looking nearly buzzing green. They appear so normal! Normal purposeful everyday women. As if extravagant embroidery plastered everywhere was the way of the world.
And see here on this piazza the witchy-looking woman, Lee Lynn, a dress of tangerine, with yet more embroidery, whole platoons of bluebirds across the chest. She stands with a hand on her hip, her other hand on the back of Claire’s chair. And in her birdlike voice, she twitters, “Ivy, we’ll show you the shop where they make the instruments.”
Tamya Soucier tells Ivy, “Stuart and Rick and Vancy and Eric can play pretty good fiddle.”
“Ricardo,” Heather corrects her.
Tamya’s fingers close up around the instrument to lift it away. She says, “Bye!” and lopes off long-leggedly.
And there by the kitchen door, not joining this welcoming group, is the whorish-looking young woman, Bonnie Loo. This time a big, square, solid Rottweiler-mix stands with his side against Bonnie Loo’s thigh. His tongue hangs rippling. In and out of his mouth, rippling, rippling, and dripping. His eyes smile into the commotion of people passing, people going in and out of doors, so many leaving, crossing the quad, all with purpose.
Heather tells Ivy, “I love your dress.”
“Thank you.” Ivy’s dress has a pattern of calendar moons in all phases. Yellow on purple. Matches her hair and her earrings of potterylike plastic stars. This morning as she dressed, she tried to think like a Settlementite. No embroidery to her name. No T-shirts made by three-year-olds. So she went for her celestial second best. The sleeve length of this dress covers her fishy tattoo; the tattoo colors would have clashed with her dress and ivy-poisoned scarlet skin.
“I love everything about you!” cries Heather and again she kisses Ivy’s head.
Claire watches this head-kissing with her unreadable, old sepia photo expression. The witchy woman and another woman, a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, fortyish blonde, confer about “the van schedule for Thursday.”
Ivy glances again toward the kitchen doors. There’s no mistake. Bonnie Loo is looking at Ivy and that look ain’t friendly. Her hands are on her hips now, feet a bit spread. The dark part of her orange-streaked hair is really dark. Her lime T-shirt looks good against her big, hard-looking, dark arms. Golden skin. Gypsy earrings. Big soft shoulders. Big but alert-looking breasts, bare under the fabric. Almost intelligent-looking breasts, pressing out against that T-shirt with creaturely pleasure, with volition. The hands strong, wrists thick. Scary. So many ways a woman like that could hurt you if she does not want you around.
Women are now
standing up from chairs, getting momentum. The tour crew. Someone from the kitchen crew takes Ivy’s plate. Ivy stands, glances again toward the kitchen door. Both Bonnie Loo and the big dog are gone. Poof!
“Where is Jane? Won’t she be joining us?” Ivy asks the witchy, gray-haired, youngish gal with the orange dress, whose name she again overhears is Lee Lynn, forgetting that introduction. In time she’ll forget again. So many names whirling through the hot steamy air. Introductions blurring together like the spotty leafy shadows.
Lee Lynn’s high, shuddery little voice says, “Jane,” spoken as though the single word were a complete and tragic statement.
The grays.
As we grays watch this unfold, we are in full study. From our location above and among the dawns and dusks of Settlement life, we have already had the tour. But the fierce pink centerpiece of today, the Ivy, the driver of the buzzy red craft, the blue liquid currents of the wrist veins, the jangling curls of the ears, the startling HAW HAW, draws our thundering eyes.
They call her the Record Sun. But that is baloney. She contains too many ghosts. Ah, that jostle and elegance and flossiness and orgiastic fun of ghosts.
The tour.
She takes many mental notes, just in case the Prophet changes his mind about her doing a story.
Today she wears her sandals. Gives her a nice springy walk, though as she is ushered from shop to shop the day’s wet foamy heat swallows her whole, presses in on her from every angle until she feels less and less springy. Her mind roams to her shower at home and her favorite towel, the icy nice feeling you get when you swish open the plastic curtain afterward.
And she thinks of the callers: “work camp” and “compound” and “terrible place” and “children worked like animals.”
She is led from the shops to the Quonset huts and other locations in haphazard fashion, back and forth, around and around, lunging through the swelter, embroidered flora and fauna in every color of the heart, churning in all peripheries, soaking up the sweat, and oh, aren’t Ivy’s tour guides proud.
Everyone’s faces and necks are shining and trickly. More sweat following other sweat. Waves of sweat. The tide is in! Leaping dolphins! Ivy sees the shops and Quonset huts filled with industry and skill, all at a kind of ambly dabbly pace, lots of yakking and laughter among those who work together, often more adults than kids. But hot. Hot. Hot.
Ivy sees the east parlor. Ivy sees the west parlor. Library teetering, shelves, tables stuffed and bulging. Ivy meets the library crew. One of them on a ladder. One with a loaded cardboard box. One heading out on an errand, book balanced on her head, la-de-da. Everyone happy and gay, as the old saying goes.
She views the print shop with a printing press black and oily, almost dripping petroleum, metal to metal, like a leer. This iron monstrosity dominates the floor while state of the art photocopiers in the corners don’t look as though they are up to the humid reality of life here.
Now on to the shop next door, where entries are being readied for the History as It Happens books. “These books are important to us,” the high-voiced, witchy-looking Lee Lynn explains. “This is our history.” She is a whirl of orange—a whirl of gray braids—three of them. She is a whirl of long arms. Two of them.
A silver-eyed pregnant person sneers, “Oh, indeed.”
Claire sighs. Claire of the sepia. Claire of the one enduring tragic expression. Black, black eyes behind the glasses. Mouth a line cut by ugly surprises? Or something.
Ivy is alert now to this pregnant girl-woman who says such things as, “Oh, indeed.” Yes, the girl’s eyes. Silvery. Her hair is cut quite a lot like Ivy’s, the bowl cut, though tapered in back. Not exactly the Ivy look. Not violet-tinted black. Hers is light brown. And no HAW! HAW! She, like Claire, is low on humor. The grimness is waist-deep and rising near these two.
Kids are dashing here and there with paperwork in hand or a drawing clutched to the chest. A young man squints at a typewriter, not typing, just thinking. A tiny old woman, wearing baggy jeans and a T-shirt that reads: I ♥ My Honda, her hair a frizzy perm like a dandelion in the white seeding stage, is comparing three similar photos.
“Oops!” A Dutch-boy-haircut, yellow-haired preteen manages to get her elbow in a jar of white paste.
“This is just like a little newsroom,” Ivy says with a happy hoot. “I love this!” She glances toward the silver eyes of the pregnant person with the Ivy haircut, but those eyes are squeezed tightly closed, head turning from side to side.
History as it happens (as recorded in a recent History as it Happens book) by Gabe Chapman and Tamya Soucier.
We had to ask more than 8 people to get all this infimation. But here it is. When I was born awile ago (me too) this road was still callet Swett’s Pond Road Some people still call it that. Way before ANYBODY was born there was 4 farms One was the Swett poeple. They all so had a blacksmit shop kind of lick we have hear now where we can forg iron only in those days you coulnunt just go buy iron alreddy shapped into things into the store. The Blacksmit shop was a important palce to be.
Down aways was the next farm of poeple name Hanley but it burd in a Fire. And Roberts farm is were Gordie lives now. What is woods now was not then. It was hayfields. And stonwals made for lines whitch are still there thro the woods.
Then poeple had too many poeple and cities got too fat so they cum here fast. They went here and they didnut like Swett’s Pond for a name. They was woried it didnut sound nise. They change Swett’s Pond to Promise Lake which they said was very pretty and had a very pretty sound. And they change the road. Was Swett’s Pond Road turd to Heart’s Content Road whitch they say is so PRrety. Also Robert’s Hill Road changed to Chrystal Veiw Road. And the Lap Road is Silver Hights. I wonder whuts next.
Cows.
The fiddle-making shop is closed up tight. Hot and dry. Abandoned but for a treacherous-looking band saw, fiddles in roller clamps, and a tall, many-paned window giving a view of sun-speckled shadows and a supper-table-diametered oak with an orange blush in the rivuleted bark.
Many shops are closed for the day, Ivy is told.
Beauty shop. Closed.
Weaving shop. Closed.
And here’s the sewing shop. Just one cloud-gray ancient lady stitching a blue quilt square, says everyone’s at the pond and how she loves the quiet.
Then for Ivy and her tour guides it’s on to the Quonset huts, which are less hot, furniture-making, shoe-making (including brain tanning of leather to make it as soft as cotton for clothing, an artful resourceful technology of America’s Indians.) Also there is machining. Then art studios featuring giant papier-mâché life forms and puppets. A pottery shed, kiln, the works. The building under the shadow of the unfinished radio tower is not offered as part of the tour. Ivy eyes it as one would any unidentified object glinting up there in the heavens.
But then there are Christmas tree fields.
Vegetable fields.
More vegetable fields.
Goats and cows. Sheep and cows. Cows and cows. And bees, their white wooden box homes busy as . . . uh . . . bees. And orchards, and the uphill woods beyond all that simmering with blue-green mystery. Lots of enthusiastic woodsy flies on the go. The moist air sags with specks of even smaller life.
Back again in the cool Quonset hut shadows, a solar car of an edible shade of purple. “Our Purple Hope!” is its name.
Ivy is impressed.
Monkeys.
The computer shop is REALLY empty. No computer! Computer none. Not even proposed. Not by any Settlement authority figures. So the tour group doesn’t bother to enter. The silvery-eyed pregnant person, who they call Lily, is now eating an apple. She whispers to Ivy that Gordon calls computers, “the devil.” Apple breath.
“No, not devil.” This from a young preteen boy with blond hair and Indian eyes. “Gordie says all technology is just like a stick or a rock, but humans are monkeys and always wind up beating everybody up with stuff.”
“Yesssss! He calls us monkeys!”
a small, leaping, hopping girl agrees from her upside-down face . . . somersaulting, kicking. A girl with ten legs. “He says we never evolved.”
Lily says through gritted teeth, “He told me computers . . . are . . . the . . . devil.”
Claire seems not to like this conversation and horns in. She talks about stained glass.
Lily’s torment.
Walking out on the boardwalk to the next shop of interest, Ivy again hears one of the women call the silvery-eyed pregnant one: “Lily.” Inside Ivy’s head, a roaring HAW HAW. Thank the heavens nobody else can hear Ivy’s head, but Ivy. She is always so tickled to know that other people besides herself get stuck with a plant name. Too bad the name Violet is fading these days. Bring it back! HAW HAW HAW!
Meanwhile, the guides are chattering about a “town meeting,” not as in the Egypt government, but the Settlement government. There are times when even the little kids get to vote. “The most important part of democracy is being informed,” one very young girl pipes up in a way that seems older than her eight or nine years. “And understanding how government really works. Not the textbook thingamajig. Do you ever read Gore Vidal?”
Ivy is stunned. This squirt reads Vidal? “No,” Ivy says darkly. Her face crimsonizes with shame. “Do you?”
“Don’t lie,” a teen girl with bloated face and extra soggy T-shirt (obviously, heat beats her up) says to the younger girl. “You just spy on our parlor talks.”
“I don’t spy.” The younger one spits on the ground. A big creamy-looking louie.
A little boy, also Indian eyes, also light-haired like the other one, grips Ivy’s elbow. “We want to be uptominus.”
“Autonomous,” an older girl corrects him.
“Like the Zapatista villages!” a preteen boy adds.
“In Mexico,” the puffed-faced dripping girl adds without thrill.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 17
