Ivy sees the silvery-eyed Lily staring at her intensely, less insolence, more a wordless cry for help.
Ivy gives a sidelong quickie glance toward the bear-sized (in diameter only) aqua T-shirt (Claire), then multiple peeks at the other of what Ivy thinks of as the Settlement’s “head women” or “women supremes,” then dodges (slow-motionlessly and unintended-appearing) between two clusters of yakkety yakking tour guides to where Lily is shuffling along. “You okay?” Ivy asks.
Lily smiles tightly. “I just hate absurdity.”
Ivy lets go with a great HAW! HAW! “A woman after my own heart,” she says in a hushy way, as if to cover over her loud laugh retroactively.
Hovering near, a wide floppy lime, orange, and purple Hawaiian shirt with a skinny boy inside it, skinny legs with knobby knees and bare feet, sandy hair and exclaimy kind of voice, tells Ivy (with a little accidental flying spit), “Zapatistas kicked the bad guys out!” (Throws out both hands.) “Even kids! Kids pushed the bad guys . . . fshhhhhfffff! (That’s his impersonation of the sound of pushing out bad guys.)”
A girl with frizzy brown curls and glasses sighs pleasurably, “Zapatistas have the best hair.”
“They never cut it,” says another girl, both about twelve, Ivy guesses.
Ivy goes with the flow on this matter. “Indians and Asians have envious hair.”
Claire (who by the way is the owner of Indian hair, which is, yes, exquisitely glossy and rich, even the gray) is moving in closer to where Ivy and Lily are hesitating on the boardwalk. Claire tells Lily, “You know, for the baby’s sake and your own, you should rest. At least go scope out a rocker and put those feet up.”
Lily places her slim arms around Claire’s vast aqua-colored blue-green cotton shape; two vast shapes, one pregnant and one not. “I love you, my fussbudget!” She kisses Claire lightly on the lips. “Fretting uses up vitamin B.”
Fretting.
Walk. Walk. Walk. So much to see. Ivy is thinking how amazing it is that a spread like this has been kept so well hidden. Hidden from what? She squints. Well, the media, of course. Reality, so to speak. Is paraphrasing bracketed with quotation marks reality? Well, yes, so to speak.
Lily is at Ivy’s side. Lily. Ivy. The two plants. Haw! Haw! Haw! Lily is done with the apple but still smells of apple. She is just striding along in her pregnant feet-wide-apart way, swinging her arms and smiling. Her kind of sandy soft voice leaps sideways into Ivy’s most available ear, “We can talk about anything but him.”
Claire is dropping back again now, obviously bothered, the sad slash of her mouth sadder, her spectacles driving home, square into Ivy, like two powerful telescopes sucking Mars and Saturn, the moon, the stars, out of the night.
Ivy hoists her shoulder bag.
Claire laces a moistly warm arm through one of Ivy’s. “It isn’t just Gordon who resists the computer craze,” she says firmly. “Most of us here know what’s good for us. Dependency on computers, TVs, and other grid-like things would not be good for us. There are people outside our community who think these things would be good for us. But we don’t think so. Don’t you think a people should have the right to decide what’s good for their lives?”
Ivy nods, grins. “Most certainly! Free country and all that.”
At last, Ivy observes the sawmill, speak of the devil.
“You like it?” a small voice asks, probably because of Ivy’s one raised eyebrow of dramatic amazement. She looks down and sees a snow-haired boy who they call Rhett.
She slaps her hand to her heart, rolls her eyes swooningly, “Oh! Sawmill!”
Rhett smiles in a most beaming way.
Outside the first mill, Ivy stops to pick a daisy. Now she twirls the daisy in her fingers and feels headachy in that high whiney zinnng! of the saws at work and the clattery chug and stink of the diesel engines. Sawdust, bark, the powdery dirt of the road, hot people, engines, and Ivy’s wilting daisy . . . all this, both fragrant and fuelly, confuse the nose.
There are three mills, actually. One is for rough lumber, one for planed, and one is a shingle mill.
Gordon is here in the rough lumber mill. Too busy. Doesn’t pay her any mind. A tall, very narrow, familiar-looking bearded young guy, his purple-checked flannel shirt tucked in, works along the carriage. And here’s Eddie, who the day of the solstice wore the toucan head? (Kill the bird! Kill the bird!) And his jazzy bejeweled belt, and all his complaints about hell.
And there is quite a charge of adolescents, both girls and boys, all wearing earplugs or “earmuffs.”
Eddie waves to Ivy and smiles showing off all his white teeth in that painstakingly shaved face that shines like glass. He seems mighty cheery for being in hell.
Ivy watches the log gliding toward its fate, the magnificent saw and all the gear works. The tractor-trailer-truck-sized diesel engine looks brand new! She again wonders where these people draw the line with technology, why this and not that? What is THE DEVIL and SEDUCTION, and what isn’t? Now she rehears Claire’s voice, Don’t you think a people should have the right to decide what’s good for their lives? Maybe this is good for them. And Ivy thinks about how she said “a people,” not just “people.” A people? When do you get to be “a people”?
Now, away from the sawmill area, there is more to see and Ivy notices that by her watch, it is nearly noon, white blazing eye of the sun turning slowly and grindingly upon the little group trudging uphill through steamy space.
“Gobbledy gobbledy goo . . .”
Ivy does another Penny double take. Not her first. There are a lot of handsome people here at the Settlement but Penny is one of those who could easily get a role in any one of hundreds of today’s movies. All she’d need to do is memorize a few dozen lines and spend the rest of the time staring into the “eyes” of the camera in a dewy way and therefore melt America. Beautiful Penny. Sort of tall. Late thirties? Nose, Romanesque. Sticky-looking lips. Lips thin, but not thinned. Just awfully English. Streaky tawny blonde locks. And the neck. One of those necks. Proud but not too-proud bearing. Friendly, yet covert. Poster woman for the Settlement cause. She explains, “Seems easier for the Mayans, who still have a culture, an interactive culture, to imagine autonomous. Those of us who have been sucking on the nipples of consumerism find it hard to believe Mother Society doesn’t really love us, just uses us. And that people have learned to see other people only as opportunities. As tools. It’s awful to see that things are—” Gobbledy. Gobbledy goo. Coo. Coo. Coocoo. Cockadoodle doo boo hoo . . . Well, this is what Ivy’s head now hears. It’s the glow of Penny’s beauty that holds Ivy’s attention, the solidness of the kids, the pregnancies, the quarrels . . . not gobbledies, not for our Ivy, no gobbledies pleeeze.
Lily hisses, “It’s not like the world will end just because of one computer.” Rolls eyes. Tsks.
Ivy’s villainous blue eyes widen. “Ah hah!”
Now the first aid shop. So small. So cozy. More like a bedroom or little den. Ivy admires everything.
The tour guides tell how there are a lot of celebrations, meals open to the townspeople and trips around the state where people want help setting up the equipment for solar and wind energy independence. “We go and teach what we know. And we learn, too,” witchy-haired Lee Lynn’s voice trills. Her orange dress, though thin and revealing, makes Ivy hot and tired just from its brilliance.
It is all starting to sound gobbledy goo now. Ivy’s head aches.
The nearby kitchens rattle and clank and hiss. Mmmmmm. The smell of food is in the air. Cake? Lemon? And something fried in butter.
Also in the air, the sound of accordion and guitar. In the air, thin as air. Behind some closed door, behind another. Like a memory. Maybe Ivy only imagines it.
The tour trudges on, passing open doors. Ivy sees flashes of men, women, dogs, kids, flashes like TV ads that spin the brain. Again some shops are empty. Corners are littered with abandoned shoes and toys. Yes, a white hen is pecking at the rug of one empty room. Only Ivy notices. Anothe
r open door shows people leaning over a table with scalpels . . . or . . . something. Another door is closed. Another open. Ivy sees a baby crawling to another baby who is napping on a pile of quilts. A small child, two-ish, hangs upside-down in a man’s arms, watches the tour crew pass, discovering the pleasantries of an inverted world.
Another plastic bag of summer heat is shoved down over Ivy’s head and neck. Ivy wonders if some people here aren’t hankering for air-conditioning. We can pretty well guess how HE feels about AC.
The meltdown.
Back out on the brick walks (the bricks of hell), under the Crisco sky, within the simmering philosophical conundrum, the tour guide crew and egg-collecting crew pass like ships in the night . . . well this is day . . . but through the glare, it seems the passing group is soft-edged and surreal. Many children. Many baskets. Many eggs. And one old man.
Okay, not baskets, exactly. Already-used commercial egg cartons of mix-and-match brands lined up in the egg wagons. They wave serenely as they pass.
Yes, and a flash of embroidery.
Somehow Ivy and Lily, the two plants HAW! HAW! weave back into side-by-side position and consider Settlement deprivations, not just computers but calculators, TVs, stereo systems, cell phones, video games, and personal motor vehicles. But take note that Gordon has his own truck.
“And he does not allow the words “Mom” or “Mommy.”
Ivy’s eyes spring open wider. However, our Ivy keeps her head straight forward, as if not really having this conversation.
Lily’s pretty and personably bucked teeth spell out distinctly, “It’s . . . because . . . he . . . thinks . . . Mom . . . and . . . Mommy . . . came . . . from . . . greeting . . . cards . . . and . . . TV. So my baby will have to call me Mother or Mammy or Mimi . . . or Mummy . . .” She sounds these out with her eyes squeezed shut. In pain. “Or maaah. It’s because he says Mom and Mommy are not mother words but devil words.”
Ivy holds her breath.
Lily lowers her voice. What she now confesses is lost. The crunching of so many fiery-bottomed shoes on flaming sands blocks out all other sound in this world. But Ivy believes she hears this phrase, “after it happened,” and this one, “Ge-yome the Great . . . is . . . a . . . pig.” And she kicks the dirt.
Now a load of hot alternators and converters goes by in a burning wagon behind a melting electric buggy, these having just been repaired in the nearest Quonset hut there, repaired by roasted demon children and demon men who might in secret call their mothers “Mommy.”
“Hungry?” witchy, orangey, trilly, tweety Lee Lynn asks, approaching from Ivy’s other side now, gives Ivy a faint one-arm squeeze and up ahead Claire has stopped walking. She is now a profile, her unsmile now epic, complete; lips corneous.
Ivy blows air up over her face, shifts her mighty mammoth of a bag to the other shoulder. She notices that witchy Lee Lynn wears a wedding ring. Silver. Weenie weensie designs. Really weensie, nearly microscope-slide-sample weensie, because the ring is slender. The finger inside it slender. Spiritlike, white, like lagoon steam. Could this Lee Lynn be the merest, airiest, tautest, flimsiest, draftiest, utterest nullified example of the white race?
Ivy admits she’s starved. And mean-spiritedness infects our Ivy in times of hunger.
“We’ll finish the tour after dinner.” Dinner here means the noon meal, the old way. Ivy hasn’t seen the kitchens yet but she bets herself a hundred bucks there are no microwaves.
Noon.
The piazzas are not as crowded as the day of the solstice but if this is “the family,” ohmygawd leaping lizard eggs! HAW! HAW! See mirth and wonder dancing in her never-resting eyes. There’s practically a hundred people, including kids. The men are back. But no sign of Gordon. And no sign of six-year-old Jane either. And now no sign of young silver-eyed computer-lusting pregnant Lily, who told of Gordon-the-pig and his devils. Off to the dungeon with Lily, eh?
“Is Jane here?” Deciding not to bring up Lily, Ivy has asked this of Claire, who again is very handy to Ivy at one of the long tables.
Claire frowns. Shakes her head. “Not today.” Then says, “That’s moose,” as she notices Ivy staring at the nearest platter. Patties with melted cheese. Claire (short person that she is) reaches, having nearly to stand in performing this feat, to pull the platter closer to the space between herself and Ivy. “And over here in this bowl, lamb with some sort of sauce. For cold meats, you have the beef and pig over there. And cold boiled eggs, egg salad, and cucumber salad. And as you can see, there is all the bread you’ll need. Good sandwich bread today.”
“MMMMMMMMMM.” Ivy reaches for some white chewy-looking sliced bread.
Claire is now hauling a flying-saucer-sized bowl of ruffly greens across the table toward the guest. “The big meats here . . .” Flashes her dark, dark eyes to the kitchen. “. . . mostly for celebrations, parties, holidays, ’n so forth. The meat today is leftovers.” A low grunty chuckle in her billowy neck. “Normally this place is Soup City. Bread, soup, bread, soup, bread, soup.” More chuckle. “Today Bonnie Loo likely wants to impress you.” Now she makes an almost mooing sound, and a clenched smile. Somehow this makes the day hotter, and a coordinated (so it seems) silence falls all along the closest tables.
Moments pass in a humid rattly way, like never-ending train cars.
Ivy strains to be reserved and offhand as she inquires, “Where’s Gordon?”
Claire raises three fingers to her lips, as she had oh, so quickly filled her mouth with food while Ivy had spoken. “I don’t know.”
A woman a couple places to the left of Claire, who has a forty-fivish face of sixty-fivish hard lines, pink green-leafed roses tattooed around her neck. She answers pleasantly and as equally offhanded as Ivy had asked, “He went for a warm swim.” She pushes another aircraft-sized salad toward Ivy, this one crowned with wheat berries and seeds, small orange tomatoes, radishes, and other cheery yummy colors. “Eat this stuff, Ivy. The last half of your tour will be really rigorous.”
Ivy blinks.
Claire snorts. “She’s just kidding, Ivy.” Munch munch munch munch. Claire is wasting no time in getting herself fed. She is truly a hungry person.
“I’m Gail. I know all these names and faces must be confusing,” the hard-faced tattooed woman declares. Her hair brown, shoulder-length, too thin, too careless.
Ivy says, “I thought you might be going to put me to work at the sawmill.”
“Not yet,” Gail laughs.
Ivy is relieved not to see any sign of Bonnie Loo now, yes, the whorish-looking cook. Thus no I-will-kill-you looks from that quarter. Ivy hopes she has left for the sawmill but suspects she’s deeeep in the kitchens, her realm of celebrated genius.
Ivy fills her plate with salad and one warm dripping-in-sauce lamb patty. She really is hungry, too. Hot, yes, but not as nervous and tired as the other day. Warm swim. She likes the way Gail said that. She realizes she had a heart-hop at this news of Gordon’s whereabouts, the reality of him.
Peak and poo.
Now hurtling into view, an important-looking, arm-swinging, damp-looking group of teen girls settles all at once into the available chairs near Ivy on both sides of the table and the next table, one squashing a noisy kiss on Claire’s cheek. One smooches Gail and Gail squeezes her eyes shut in melodramatic thrill. All these girls. So many bare arms, bare throats, and collarbones and summery colors and some embroidery, of course. And heat flush. And smiles. All those eyes on Ivy. Ivy smiles back, vaguely recognizing some of them.
But now more arrivals. A couple teen and preteen boys. Smiling at Ivy. One is stippled with sawdust, T-shirt, hair, arms. He gives Ivy the thumbs-up. For some reason. Hardly matters. It makes her day.
And now more! Tromping onto the scene, running and gasping as if from danger, smelling metallic, salty, a waggly mob of younger youngsters surround the Ivy area of the two adjacent tables, both sides, fore and aft, drawing in tight like a laundry bag string. One boy is nearly naked, bare feet, cut-off jeans, t
orn, shredded, mended, then shredded again, smoodgy around the eyes, hands black in the seams. Scrappy and savage. In real school, his entire being would be labeled trash.
One of the older girls formally announces, “Ivy! This is the solar crew! Part of it, anyway. Electricians and painters. At your disposal!”
This girl is about fifteen, has yellow hair swept up in a hard braided knot with big damp worms of hair loose around the ears. Big gray-green eyes. And what are those cheekbones? Slavic? Nordic? Yeah, a Slavic-Nordic princess. Did the old-days’ Nordics have princesses? Viking royalty? Well, here is one for them. Just as there are important-looking women here, alpha women, pivotal women, power women, seems there are some important-looking teen girls, too, and this is one of them. And she tells Ivy, “There are more solar crew members. They aren’t around today. Off on a mission. And some are tied up.” She wags a finger in the direction of the Quonset huts. “But they’re the ones who made the Purple Hope. You need to interview them sometime.”
Claire’s eyes and Gail’s eyes flash at the speaking girl.
Speaking girl has already realized her mistake? Is this why she touches her lips with two fingers? Then she giggles. “You’ll love the stuff they figured out. YAY to the Purple Hope!” She throws up a fist.
The crew shrieks and “YAYYYYYYY!”s. And there are two ear-splitting whistles.
“Go, purple, go!” cries out a preteen girl from behind Ivy’s chair.
Ivy is laughing. Her HAW HAWs fit right in with this rough-and-ready crowd.
Claire’s eyes, glittering blackly behind her specs, now remain steadily on Ivy’s face. And as she stares, her jaws work, chewing her meal, the jaws stopping for a couple of long thought-filled pauses, but no pauses in the stare.
Ivy has stopped eating altogether. Just dealing with the invasion of all these hot arms, jiggling knees, sockless feet in sassy little homemade moccasins, hot breathing and blowing faces, wet canny eyes, and now more, a few stragglers arriving, the stricture drawing swelteringly tighter around Ivy, The press. Death by clamminess.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 18
